https://goo.gl/focVdNOn a recent Thursday afternoon, 43 demonstrators were arrested outside of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office. They shouted “No cuts to Medicaid!” as Capitol Police lifted some from wheelchairs and removed them from the building. The activists were quick to point out that the vans used to transport them were wheelchair accessible, which they attributed to decades of similar direct action.
“We’re here to fight for our freedom,” said Erik von Schmetterling, a demonstrator from Philadelphia, as he waited outside the police station for the others to emerge. It was humid and late in the afternoon. Schmetterling looked weary under his Philadelphia Eagles baseball cap. He had a blurry amateur tattoo of a person in a wheelchair on his forearm. It looked like the typical handicapped parking sign, but the figure’s arms were raised in victory above its head. “It’s us in the wheelchair, breaking the chains,” Schmetterling explained.
the proposed changes to Medicaid go well beyond a budgetary trim. Right now, more than
80 percent of Medicaid’s budget funds health care for the disabled, elderly, and children. The plan “fundamentally changes Medicaid in a way that hasn’t been done before,” said MaryBeth Musumeci, a Medicaid expert at Kaiser Family Foundation. The Senate bill would reduce Medicaid’s budget by a projected
35 percent over the next two decades, compared to current policy, and because so much of its budget already goes to the neediest Americans, Musumeci said it would have “profound implications for all beneficiaries.”
That’s because such a large reduction leaves states little option but to raise taxes, pay doctors less, limit who gets coverage, cut back on services—or perhaps do all at once.
Some services, like hospital care and nursing homes, are mandated under federal law and can’t be cut. But advocates warn that because other services that are essential to disabled people are technically optional, they could be the first on the chopping block.
Chief among those optional benefits are the Medicaid-funded attendants who help about 3 million disabled Americans get out of bed, bathe, eat breakfast, drive to work, and go to sleep at night.
“When states are squeezed for money they are going to reduce those services or end them all together,” said Mary Lou Breslin, a policy analyst at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, “and without that help they face institutionalization.”