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In Beckley, West Virginia, Cameo Sampson and her husband rely on Medicaid to cover the intensive therapies and medical care their 13-year-old daughter Evelyn needs to thrive. Proposed Medicaid cuts threaten to undo that stability, putting families like theirs at risk of financial ruin and forcing impossible choices about their children’s care.
When her four-month-old son fell from his highchair, Hanna Utkin rushed to the emergency room for help, only to later receive hundreds of dollars in unexpected “facility fees” for a visit that lasted just minutes. Her experience highlights how hidden hospital charges can leave families paying far more than they expect.
Tony is a professor in Pennsylvania who relies on enhanced premium tax credits to afford his gold-level health plan while teaching and supporting his family. Now battling stage four cancer, he fears losing the subsidies that make his coverage—and his care—possible.
Diagnosed with a life-threatening immune deficiency at 19, Brick Williams relies on expensive plasma-based treatments to stay healthy and work full-time as a music teacher. The Affordable Care Act made his self-employment sustainable, but the expiration of enhanced premium tax credits could force him to abandon his career or face financial ruin.
At 61, Delaine Dixon of Texas relies on pain management after multiple spine surgeries, but recent insurance changes and hidden facility fees have made getting care nearly impossible. Living on Social Security, she now faces the impossible choice between paying hundreds in unexpected charges or going without the treatment she needs to manage her pain.
Maureen Malesco of Middletown, New Jersey, utilizes Medicaid to support her daughter, Mairead, who was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at 19 months. “At the time, which was 1999, she was the youngest person in New Jersey to have been diagnosed with autism,” Maureen recalled. Mairead has grown into a capable adult who works at a day program for autistic adults, earning a modest income while living with her mother.
May, a young woman from the Midwest, was diagnosed with a life-threatening pulmonary embolism and prescribed costly blood thinners to prevent another clot. Even with good employer-sponsored insurance, she faced staggering out-of-pocket costs—hundreds of dollars a month—for medication she needed to survive.
Madison works with a mobile dentistry company that primarily serves people who have Medicaid. She explains that the company began serving senior centers where many residents had Medicaid and needed dentures but were unable to leave the facilities. The work expanded and now also provides services to the YMCA, YWCA, substance abuse recovery centers, and homeless shelters.
Cassenda Nelson lives in Camilla, a rural community in southwest Georgia, where health care is limited and resources are hard to come by. She’s a mother of four, a community health worker, and the full-time caregiver to her daughter Amunet, who lives with type 2 diabetes and experiences seizures.
Katherine Twomey, a licensed clinical social worker and lifelong Long Islander, has dedicated her entire career to community mental health. Living in New York’s 1st Congressional District, she works as a psychotherapist at a community mental health clinic where she and her colleagues serve patients with severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. Nearly all of their patients rely on Medicaid.