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MEDICAID COVERAGE - The paper sheet crinkled under me as I shifted on the vinyl examination table. The doctor paused. “Hmm,” she said quietly.
This was January 2021. I’d patched together a few gigs since completing a masters degree program the previous year, but was still struggling to find full-time work at the height of the pandemic.
A nagging feeling told me not to delay my annual well-woman exam again, having skipped it in 2020 due to COVID-19 and being uninsured. And I’m glad I went — the doctor found a concerning level of precancerous cervical cells.
Cervical cancer was once a common cause of cancer death in the U.S., but increased access to preventive care over the last several decades has cut death rates by more than half. Federal funding for Medicaid, which helps states expand health care services to low-income populations, has contributed to this success.
So it was for me, too. Although I was unemployed, I was able to access the initial screening and follow-up treatments through Medicaid. (State Medicaid programs can have different names. In my state, Wisconsin, it’s BadgerCare.)
Thanks to this coverage, my case was detected early. I made a full recovery and subsequently landed a job with health care benefits. However, if it had been up to Republican lawmakers, this story may have had a very different ending. With Trump’s support, nearly every single House Republican voted to pass a budget resolution that cuts an unimaginable $2 trillion from social services, especially Medicaid.
They’ve packaged this attack on Medicaid as an effort to cut “wasteful” spending and punish the “parasite class.” That’s how billionaire Elon Musk — who was raised with a silver spoon in an affluent, all-white suburb in apartheid South Africa — refers to Americans who use federal benefits.
We are not parasites. We are your family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers.
The vast majority of Medicaid recipients are working or in school. Others have jobs that don’t provide health insurance or are temporarily unemployed, as I was. Medicaid is also a critical lifeline for 10 million people with disabilities, two-thirds of seniors in nursing homes, 14 million adults who have a mental health condition or substance use disorder, and tens of thousands of children who receive mental health services in public schools.
More than 72 million U.S. citizens — over 20 percent of the population — rely on Medicaid.
That includes over 33 million people nationwide living in congressional districts represented by Republican lawmakers who are pushing for these devastating cuts.
Medicaid is an example of government success — access to health care like the screening and treatments I received saves lives and money. What’s so great about going back to an era where people die from preventable diseases?
That’s not all. While slashing Medicaid, the GOP budget blueprint boosts spending for Pentagon contractors, a disastrous mass deportation policy that rips apart families and would forcibly displace millions of taxpayers, and $4.5 trillion in tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy.
I now study that spending for my work. And talk about waste and fraud.
If Trump and the GOP were truly interested in saving taxpayer dollars, they wouldn’t be increasing the near-trillion dollar Pentagon budget, which has never passed an audit. Half or more of that spending goes to war profiteers — for-profit Pentagon contractors whose business models rely on government handouts and who routinely overcharge taxpayers.
Elon Musk’s businesses alone have received at least $38 billion in government funding from the Pentagon and other agencies. What was that again about a parasite class?
Cutting effective, life-saving services to further enrich billionaires and Pentagon contractors like Musk is the worst possible option. These things don’t save lives — Medicaid does.
We still have time to fight back against this dangerous budget. And we must. Our health and futures depend on it.
(Hanna Homestead is a federal budget researcher with the National Priorities Project of the Institute for Policy Studies. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.)
