To The Reader’s Forum:

In our county, on our roads and at our religious services, there are people we see or know whose budget is stretched tight. Maybe they’ve had one of those injuries that mean you have to find a different kind of job, or maybe they have a family member with a chronic illness. They are pregnant, or disabled, need medications or they are children. They are likely to be able to keep going because they have Medicaid.

Right now, there’s a bill in front of our House of Representatives that instructs the House Energy and Commerce Committee to cut 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). Our Congress may hope that cutting Medicaid will pay for tax cuts and reduce the projected budget deficit. Those cuts, by a huge margin, benefit the top 1%, or even top 10% of incomes, people who have access to standard health insurance until they collect Social Security. These top income earners can get to keep even more money.

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. We don’t have to know, or like, someone to know that no one is disposable. And if the burden for Medicaid is placed on the individual States, so that federal taxes won’t cover it anymore, every state is punished so that our wealthiest citizens can get to pay low or for some, no taxes. Of all the things we could possibly agree on, it’s that we want children to have access to healthcare. We want parents, grandparents, school bus drivers, nursing assistants, convenience store clerks, service workers to have access to healthcare. Medicaid provides this. We have to choose between paying for it through the federal taxes we’ve contributed, or withdraw that support so that those of means can keep more federal taxes, and leave it to each State to figure out how to find more money in State budgets.

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 vote for a bill that supports “the least of these”. We are the kind of people that do that in so many ways. Let’s make sure our Representative does it as well.

Deborah First

Chautauqua