By Michael Faccinetto and Joseph Roy, Lehigh Valley Live
Congress is making momentous decisions that could fundamentally reshape U.S. health care with a serious negative impact on our most vulnerable children. The House of Representatives already voted in favor of $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid, the program that covers one in three American children.
Local critics have focused on the immense harm that would come from taking $2 billion away from Pennsylvania by 2020 and threaten healthcare that reaches 2.8 million residents.
Make no mistake, Medicaid cuts are a backdoor cut to K-12 education funding.
Pennsylvania schools stand to lose more than $40 billion in Medicaid reimbursements that pay for healthcare for disadvantaged children and special-education services delivered on site. That will mean employing fewer nurses, physical therapists, speech pathologists, and other professionals. Vision, hearing, asthma and mental health screening programs may go away. It will also become more difficult to integrate the necessary support and technologies that empower disabled students to learn alongside their peers.
We know that our most vulnerable families need access to high quality medical care, safe and affordable housing, and jobs with family-sustaining wages so that students are well positioned to take full advantage of learning opportunities available in our public schools. We use the term “collective impact” to describe the team effort needed to support our neighbors in need.
Abandoning a 50-year, bipartisan commitment to children’s health undermines society’s “collective impact” and will have long-term repercussions. Studies demonstrate that children enrolled in Medicaid experience a lifetime of reduced disease and disability compared with their uninsured peers. They also do better academically and go on to secure higher paying jobs and contribute more in taxes.
Slashing Medicaid will have the opposite effects: higher healthcare costs, increasingly strained government budgets, students less able to benefit from educational opportunities and a workforce less prepared to take on the challenges of a technology-driven global economy.
The sad reality is that the most vulnerable students — those in need of medical treatment or physical assistance — would lose the most. But they won’t be alone. Many of the services funded by Medicaid are legally mandated. As federal funding dries up, schools will have to reallocate money from elsewhere.
When federal and state mandates on schools are not funded at the state and federal level, the burden for paying for these mandates is shifted to the local taxpayer. The potential cut in Medicaid reimbursement to schools combined with state-mandated pension payments and unfunded state-mandated charter school tuition payments adds to the financial burdens of school districts, leading to a combination of unpopular cuts in educational programs combined with unpopular property tax increases.
Our great country can do better than this.
Michael Faccinetto is president of the Bethlehem Area School District School Board and president of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association. Joseph Roy is the superintendent of the Bethlehem Area School District.