By Mike Hyland, President and CEO
The inexplicable assault on Medicaid continues in the Trump administration and there is good reason for people to worry about it. The President’s stated plan to gut Medicaid by almost a trillion dollars over a ten year period, while cutting taxes for millionaires, will eviscerate crucial programs that allow people with developmental disabilities to live safe and meaningful lives in community-based settings. We should all wonder aloud why this population of marginalized people should be so brazenly abandoned. After we wonder about it, we should be appalled. We should also be gravely concerned for another forgotten group: the dedicated workforce of professionals who support these people in the community.
For too long already, we have allowed people who do the very difficult work of direct care to be almost entirely neglected by national policy makers. Advocacy to guarantee legitimately livable wages and increases, affordable health care, access to higher education and professional development too often fall on deaf ears in Washington D.C. Publicly, officials praise the incredible work being done by so many committed professionals. Privately, they do little to support this workforce. Now, astonishingly, the Trump administration is dismissing these professionals and the value of their skills by proposing a budget that will make it virtually impossible for them to get paid appropriately for the vital work they do every day.
According to the Baker administration, a cut of this magnitude would cost Massachusetts approximately $1.5 billion in the first year alone. Obviously, this kind of cut cannot be absorbed under current revenue collections, meaning that the state will have to significantly cut programs for developmentally disabled people or significantly raise taxes or, more likely, do both. The needs of an already underpaid workforce will certainly not be prioritized in state contracts under such conditions because the money won’t be there. We already have a genuine workforce crisis in the field of human services in this country. By obliterating the funding mechanism that pays direct care professionals, the Trump White House is saying loud and clear that the new administration values the wealthy above the disabled and those who do so much to help them. How sad that after so many years of advances in overcoming disabilities, stigma, bullying, isolation, and discrimination, the disability community now faces its greatest threat from people elected to help them. How sad that the dedicated people who work tirelessly to this day to make these advances possible stand to be abandoned by those who once promised unequivocally not to cut Medicaid.
It is totally irrelevant where the plans to cut Medicaid by such a staggering amount originate. The position, the political party, the individual, or the special interest group that encourages such devastation doesn’t matter. Anyone who plans to do harm to so many must always be challenged and educated to understand what Medicaid truly does. Such massive cuts as currently planned dangerously expose people who need help through no fault of their own. Just as troubling, they signal a total dismissal of the very real needs of the many professionals who already sacrifice so much to help others. These amazing men and women deserve much, much better than that.
