“An absolute moral failure”: Disability advocates react to Trump’s Medicaid cuts

On Thursday, House Republicans voted to enact a spending bill that will strip close to one trillion dollars from federal Medicaid funding across a decade—an attack expected to cause tens of thousands of preventable deaths each year, disproportionately among the one in three disabled people on Medicaid in the US.

The cuts will, among other reductions in treatment, limit Medicaid’s home and community based-services, endanger rural hospitals, and kick millions of users off Medicaid altogether, especially those unable to secure exemptions to the bill’s new work requirements.

“It’s a devastating day for disabled people to witness members of Congress, people who are elected to serve the people, be willing to strip healthcare away from 17 million Americans,” said Maria Town, CEO and president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, “and endanger disabled people’s ability to live, work and thrive in our communities.”

Republicans in Congress have played down or denied the impact of the cuts—which Town calls an out-and-out lie: “Many disabled people [whose insurance is] covered via Medicaid expansion…are going to lose access to their health care.”

Nicole Jorwic, chief program officer at the nonprofit Caring Across Generations, is shocked that the bill’s open funding of tax cuts for the ultra-rich through gutting Medicaid still allowed it to pass. “That narrative was a clear one—taking care away from people to pay for tax cuts was an even stronger message than in 2017, when we did win” a fight against the rollback of the Affordable Care Act, she said.

Little Lobbyists executive director and co-founder Elena Hung, who has been fighting alongside other families in Washington, DC, to try and prevent the cuts, described the vote as a “punch in the gut.”

“It’s just an absolute moral failure,” Hung said. “At the end of the day, this Congress lacks the courage to do the right thing.”

For people like Hung, their kids’ future hangs in the balance. “Medicaid is the only way that children like mine are able to live at home and be in their communities and not be forced into a medical facility or institution,” Hung said. “It is literally lifesaving for children like mine.”

Cuts to Medicaid are not the only devastating attack on the social safety net in the budget bill that just passed the House: It also includes $230 billion in cuts to SNAP over the next decade.

“There are many disabled people who receive SNAP,” Town said. “In fact, I believe four out of all five households that receive SNAP benefits have a family member with a disability in them.”

For the disability advocates I spoke with, Thursday was a difficult day without a clear plan for tomorrow.

“While there is sure to be devastation and unfortunately, lives lost, and we need to be able to mourn for that,” Jorwic said, “what the disability community has always shown is that we can come together and imagine something that other people can’t see as possible.”

“We have to have hope to continue to fight,” Hung said. “When I think about families like mine, families with kids with complex medical needs and disabilities, there isn’t a choice to give up.”