Kathy Baron, who is enrolled in Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly, feeds her cat, Munchkin, a treat at her home in Denver, August 2, 2016. (Photo: Nick Cote / The New York Times)
Many will take to the streets to protest Trump’s budget proposal this summer, which threatens to slash everything from solar panels to school lunches, but the deepest cuts will be felt deep in our neighborhoods — in the living rooms of aging grandparents and neighbors using wheelchairs, for whom chronic everyday struggles are about to spiral into an acute crisis. Seniors and people with disabilities are two fast-growing but often overlooked groups that are facing an economic cliff if Trump and Republicans push through plans to gut Medicaid.
Health care for the most vulnerable people in the country faces unprecedented cuts under Trump’s proposed Medicaid cutbacks, along with the Republicans’ Obamacare repeal legislation — both of which would deprive poor and middle-class households of hundreds of billions in health funds over a decade. In addition to endangering the survival of thousands of elderly and disabled Americans, the cuts threaten to upend a revolution in care now unfolding nationwide.
One of the bright spots of innovation in Medicaid in recent years has been the rise of a community-based home care system that provides personal attendants and health aides to households, delivering basic health and social services and household help for people relying on aid to live independently. Today, with hundreds of thousands of care workers, California is a weathervane for this rising health care sector.
According to research by the Labor Center of the University of California, Los Angeles, even prior to Trump’s budget plans, California families have struggled to pay for the growing cost of in-home health services, despite California’s relatively robust home health care structure, while caregivers struggle with unlivable wages.
In some cases, those two groups overlap, with many family…