Congress must protect Medicaid, an essential program that 88 million people in the U.S. rely on for their healthcare, including 54 million aging adults, children, military members, veterans, and disabled people.
The proposed cuts to Medicaid would risk healthcare coverage for eight million aging adults, cut coverage for more than three million children of active military members and veterans, as well as children of low-income families. It would threaten health coverage for millions of disabled people with severe mental and physical disabilities. Plans to impose work requirements to restrict access to Medicaid would also be incredibly harmful to people in poor health, disabled people, and older people ages 50 to 65, for whom there are few job opportunities. Meeting basic life-sustaining needs should not be contingent on meeting a work requirement.
Reducing access to Medicaid would only hurt – not help – people in this country. Instead of taking healthcare away from people, Congress should protect Medicaid. If Congress really wants to cut the deficit, they should make the wealthy and big corporations pay their fair share.
