To The Reader’s Forum:

In our county there are people we see or know whose budget is stretched tight. Maybe they’ve lost their job because of an injury, a chronic illness, they’re pregnant, or disabled, they are children. They have been able to keep going because they have Medicaid.

Our House of Representatives just passed a bill instructing the House Energy and Commerce Committee to cut -over 10 years- at least $880 Billion dollars in costs. Recent proposals from the House Budget committee have taken these cuts from Medicaid AND the Children’s Health Insurance Plan (CHIP). Congress hopes that cutting Medicaid will pay for tax cuts and reduce the projected budget deficit. Those tax cuts, by a huge margin, benefit the top 1%, or even top 10% of incomes, people who already have standard health insurance until they collect Social Security.

The safety net for people at the lower or lowest income level has been Medicaid and CHIP. If you don’t have Medicaid, you don’t have insurance, so you are told you must cover the full cost of your mastectomy, your broken leg or maybe your asthma meds. If you can’t, so you don’t get the treatment you need.

We are better people than this. No one is disposable. If the cost for Medicaid is placed on individual States, every state is stretched and our wealthiest citizens get to pay low or no taxes. We can agree that we want children to have healthcare. We want parents, grandparents, school bus drivers, nursing assistants, convenience store clerks, service workers to have healthcare. Medicaid provides this. We have to choose between paying for it through the federal taxes we’ve contributed, or support the tax-cut bill so that the wealthy can pay less in national support.

Let’s call Representative Langworthy. Let’s remind him that we are people who care about maternal health, children’s health, our senior citizens, our disabled neighbors, our hardworking service providers. Let’s remind him to revise the tax-cut bill so that it supports “the least of these”. We are the kind of people that do that. Let’s encourage our Representative to do it too.