brendan halpin

Hi folks! Just wanted to drop this in here because I haven’t seen it mentioned elsewhere, but in addition to all the other horrible things medicaid cuts will do (like possibly kill my mother, who has dementia and diabetes and relies on care paid for by medicaid to stay alive), they will also harm public schools.

Allow me to explain! If your child needs Speech, or Occupational Therapy, or possibly some other interventions, they can get these from the professionals in your public school district starting at age 3. Free of charge to you, the parent! Good deal!

Assuming these services are not done as part of a Head Start program (which I believe has also been cut to the bone, so probably they won’t be), your public school district can bill Medicaid for the time these service providers spend servicing children who are not currently enrolled students.

Since these services are legally mandated, they won’t be able to stop offering them when Medicaid is cut. They’ll just have to shift the money from somewhere else.

You can probably connect the dots, but I’ll do it for you—the money has to come from somewhere. So deferring maintenance on the physical plant will probably be first on the list. Well, maybe cuts to the arts will be first. Athletics? Other extracurriculars? The loss of Medicaid funding will make public schools, particularly urban public schools who serve the highest number of students and the highest percentage of special needs students, less functional. And then the education privatizers will swoop in and say, “See! Public education doesn’t work! We need to privatize the whole thing! Just connect the kids with AI chatbots and we’ll call that education!”

Uggh. Anyway, if you’re reading this you’re probably already appalled, but I just wanted to raise awareness about another side effect of the Big Horrible Bill.