#save medicaid

[raygun631]

[alannacouture]

No Kings ❌👑

Wish I could go to a No Kings protest, but being disabled means I’m counting on all of you to hold the line for me. Just know I’m there in spirit & solidarity; so many are marching with you, standing with you, and supporting you, even if you can’t see us. We’ve got your backs & we’re all on the right side of history, especially today.  🇺🇸💙

[rifflovesjoey]

The View from the Bottom

On the high-achieving eldest daughter and the machine designed to break her.

TW: scary healthcare stuff, emotional abuse, parental neglect, late-stage capitalism horrors. 1200-ish words, no beta.

I depend on a Medicaid transportation service to get to my medical appointments. I have no car, no public transit, no one to call. So when that service doesn't show up — like it didn't this morning, for an appointment that's part of figuring out whether I have a fucking brain tumor — there's no backup plan. There's just: sorry, we'll have to reschedule.

I did everything right. I confirmed the ride. I texted the driver over the weekend. I had an actual conversation about pickup time. And still — Sunday night, no confirmation. Monday morning, no car. This is the second major appointment I've missed this way. In a row. I am devastated to the point of near catatonia. I can't pay $75 for a Lyft. I'm recovering from a heart attack. I want to give up.

To understand why this moment knocked me to my knees, you have to know where I was four short years ago. Because the distance between that life and this one is staggering.

Against the odds, I rose to the C-Suite at a multi-billion dollar healthcare company. It was a hard road. I didn’t have the ivy league credentials of my peers—I actually dropped out of college—but I had a mentor who gave me a chance and I worked my ass off. I was lucky. For decades I helped build that company. I led a staff of 40 hard-working, wildly creative people. The walls of our office were lined with trophies and industry accolades. I lived in gratitude. I was careful, humble. I was finally able to travel. I owned a home. I had savings. I had a fridge full of healthy food. I had a car and the freedom that comes with it and all the other things that are so ordinary when you have them that you forget they're not guaranteed.

Then the company was acquired by…wait for it…UnitedHealthcare. I was laid off along with my entire staff and hundreds of others. Two months later, on my 50th birthday, I was diagnosed with cancer.

What followed was the kind of unraveling that happens so fast you can't track it in real time. You only understand it looking back. Cancer. Then atrial fibrillation. Then gallbladder disease. Constant hospitalizations. No job meant my savings evaporated. I lost everything. And that was just the beginning.

This is when I learned something about family. I had been, for a long time, the successful one. The high-achieving eldest daughter. The one who flew everyone to Vail at Christmas. The one who drove a nice car, had nice clothes, a nice house, lavished everyone with gifts. The one people were proud of. I was the one who held the world together, the one who wasn’t allowed to fail. A workaholic - and that was seen as a virtue.

Turns out that version of family love has conditions attached that nobody mentions while things are going well. A daughter who's a relatively high-paid executive is easy to love. A daughter who's broke and sick and needs things? That's a different ask. They weren't interested in that ask.

So I added that loss to the list. The family who was supposed to rally around me was a mirage. It always had been. I am no-contact with my entire bloodline now, with a C-PTSD diagnosis to boot. That diagnosis was a true moment of clarity—the realization that my health issues weren't just bad luck, but likely a direct correlation to the emotional abuse and neglect I received growing up. Now I understand that all abuse is physical. You don't have to be hit to suffer.

A friend of 25 years took me in. I moved across the country into her home and tried to stabilize. And then I had an aneurysm. Emergency surgery. I nearly died. And then a heart attack. And then a cervical disc extrusion that compressed nerves and left me in the kind of pain that doesn't go away—it just becomes the new baseline you try to function on top of. And now my eye has started drooping, and I'm in the middle of an extensive workup to determine the cause of something called Horner's syndrome. One of the things they're ruling out is a brain tumor. And given my cancer history, time is of the essence.

That's the workup I've been trying to get to. That's the appointment the car didn't show up for this morning.

I know this system. I spent two decades inside it. I know how these companies are run, how they talk about patients in boardrooms, how the language of care gets deployed to cover decisions that are purely financial. I wrote some of that language. I believed in the mission of the company I worked for—genuinely, for a long time. And then I became a Medicaid patient in a rural community, entirely dependent on a sketchy transportation service to get to appointments that are keeping me alive. The gap between the mission statement and the reality is so vast it's almost funny. Almost.

The transportation service that stood me up this morning isn't an anomaly. It's a symptom. I'm not falling through a crack. I'm falling through a design feature.

When I called this morning and told them this appointment was to rule out a brain tumor—I said those exact words—it didn't spur them to action. There was a slight tonal adjustment meant to register sympathy, and then: we can't find another ride. I used to be on the other side of moments like this. I know how those conversations get handled internally. I'm not naive about any of it. And I am still sitting here genuinely shaken by how it feels to be the patient in that equation.

The cuts coming to Medicaid and Medicare aren't going to show up as a single dramatic event. They're going to show up as a ride that doesn't come. As an appointment that gets pushed back six weeks. As a diagnosis that arrives three months later than it should have. The healthcare system in this country is already operating well past its stress tolerance for the most vulnerable people in it. What's coming isn't a reform. It's an accelerant.

So, the boulder rolls back to the bottom. I walk down the hill, find my place behind it, and start pushing again. Because the car didn't show, I now have to wait two more months for a new appointment because of a specialist shortage in the region—sixty more days of praying that whatever is in my head isn't growing while my heart tries to heal. I will confirm the next ride. I will explain the urgency, one more time, to one more person who is paid not to hear it.

And I already know, before I even pick up the phone, exactly how it’s going to go.

---------------------------------

Postscript:

As I navigate this hellscape, the support from our community of freaky little sweethearts has been a literal lifeline. If you’re able and would like to help, you can find my Ko-fi here:

Support Riff: Meds & Market Fund 🍓

Me hugging you🩷

[charliettea]

Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ bans transgender care for Medicaid and Obamacare

‘It's one more example of health care that they're trying to rip away,’ Rep. Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender member of Congress,

Hi friends. Please take a moment to fight back against HR1 & prevent our rights from being stripped away. I've put together a call script/email message that you can use when contacting your senators.

You can use https://www.5calls.org to call them and https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm to message them.

Hi, my name is _____. I’m a constituent of Senator _____ and my zip code is _____.

I’m contacting you today to ask that you oppose the “one big beautiful bill” HR1. If it passes, HR1 will cut funding from medicaid, SNAP, and student aid. This would prevent millions of americans from accessing healthcare, education, and even food. These are human rights. In addition to budget cuts, HR1 would stop medicaid from covering gender-affirming healthcare for all americans. House Republicans struck the word “minors” from this section, meaning that trans people of any age will not be able to receive healthcare critical to our survival through medicaid.

Not only would HR1 slash the budget of programs that support americans, it would also give billions of dollars to ICE to kidnap, detain, torture, and deport people without due process. Due process is a constitutional right, and ICE should not be able to take that away. For all of these reasons, I am asking that you respect the demands of your constituents and oppose HR1.

[pintadorartist]

Help Stop Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill"

House Committees have been working on completing their individual portions of the budget reconciliation bill that Republicans are pushing through to enact hefty tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. To pay for these tax cuts—and take advantage of the filibuster-proof reconciliation procedure—Republicans are including many spending cuts and policy changes from their partisan wish list.

In addition to gutting Medicaid, boosting ICE funding and green lighting the sale of public lands for fossil fuel production, these harmful provisions include:

$351 billion in cuts to student aid. This includes new limits on Pell Grant eligibility, new caps on how much a student can borrow, roll backs of protections from predatory lenders, and a repeal of President Biden’s student debt forgiveness program.

$50 billion in cuts to the Federal Employee Retirement System, including significant reductions in take-home pay, retirement benefits, and protections against unjust treatment for federal workers.

Slashes to funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) by nearly 70% and a complete dissolution of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the government’s top watchdog of public company audits.

A widespread roll back of climate-focused programs and clean energy tax incentives authorized by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, including the elimination of EV tax credits, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, and countless other grants that have led to $630 billion in new business investments and jobs.

A $300 billion funding cut and stringent new work requirements for SNAP, the food assistance program that helps over 42 million low-income people nationwide.

Language pulled from the REINS Act, a long-time Republican goal, that would give Congress new control over federal rule making. This would make it easier for Republicans to roll back any regulation they don’t like, including those that have already been finalized and implemented.

A limit to federal judges’ authority to hold government officials in contempt of court. A move clearly designed to defend the Trump administration from accountability for defying the courts.

Once all committee work is complete, the House and Senate will both need to approve and vote on the full reconciliation bill. House Republicans are aiming for a floor vote by Memorial Day weekend.

What is worse is that the GOP is planning to advance the bill even further at 1 a.m. to avoid attention.

Call your Reps and demand they oppose this destructive bill.

These are scripts to various aspects of the bill:

This one below is a more general version:

Oppose Harmful Provisions in the "One Big Beautiful Bill" Act ⭑ 5 Calls

House Committees have been working on completing their individual portions of the budget reconciliation bill that Republicans are pushing th

The rest are more specific to certain provisions of the bill, call them as well under the Big Bueatiful Bill Act: https://5calls.org/all/

Fax Tool:

Free Fax: Send Faxes Online Free

Send a fax to anywhere in the U.S. or Canada for free.

Find your legislator:

[jomiddlemarch]

[martyr-mayhem]

Find your local event:

Hands Off!

Donald Trump and Elon Musk think this country belongs to them. They're taking everything they can get their hands on and daring the world to

[mugiwara-lucy]

As a follow up to my post yesterday about people losing their shit (rightfully so) about the GOP getting ready to gut Medicaid to pay for billionaire tax breaks (alongside Elon Musk getting more Ketamine) so here's what WE ALL are going to do.

This is a link from the queen AOC where you'll enter your name, email address, phone number and zipcode so you can find whoever your state's committee is and GIVE THEM HELL!!

Save Medicaid

Please call your Representative right now and leave a voicemail, or first thing on Monday morning before the mark up session begins.

Without Medicaid people WILL DIE!!!!!