Tina Roathe: Challenging the Stigma Around Medicaid

Tina Roathe is a 54-year-old woman with five children living in Kansas City, Missouri. She depends on Medicaid to help cover the care she needs. Though not her first time using the program — she previously relied on it for secondary coverage during her pregnancies — she now depends on it to manage a recently developed disability. “I was working, very active, and one day at home, I don’t even remember. I just woke up. They think I had a mild stroke,” she said. “Your world can change within a blink of an eye.”

For Tina and her family, her disability was a life-changing situation. “You just don’t know until you’re put in that position that you have to start relying upon resources that are out there because without the resources, then you’re going, ‘what do I do?’ That puts more added stress on family members and on the patient themselves to try to figure out life.”

After her stroke, Tina was unable to work, so she turned to the state Medicaid system. “I applied initially for Medicaid through Missouri and was granted that in the process of waiting to receive my disability decisions. That helped me be able to establish a primary physician and … get to the specialists I needed to see, and to have some security in that I was able to get to these services.”

As with most people in her situation, Tina knew that the approval process for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) would be long and arduous. She shared, “I knew that the challenge with just getting social security disability was going to be up to a year if not longer.”

While the coverage Tina has is “a true blessing”, she also says that the disability insurance system is a “double-edged sword because you don’t have income to pay the bills.” She knows that she is like most people who would like to be able to afford everything she needs, including health insurance, but unfortunately realizes that “for a lot of people, that is just not reality.”

Tina wants to address the stigma implied by the work reporting requirements established in the Republican health care cuts that were passed earlier this year. “Don’t look at it as people being lazy. I hear that all the time, and I get offended by that because I worked, I wasn’t lazy, and for whatever reason it happened to me and my health issue changed… That’s something that can happen to anyone. So, don’t look down on people that need it.”

Tina feels grateful for Medicaid because it allowed her to get the care she needs for her disability. The importance of these services cannot be overstated because “circumstances come without your control. You can go from ‘I’m on top of the world’ to, in a blink of an eye, ‘I’m sick, I need help.’ And you would want that [health care coverage] for you or for your family member.”