Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Kids' Healthcare Can't Withstand Medicaid Cuts

Kids' Healthcare Can't Withstand Medicaid Cuts

The risk to children’s hospitals, which rely heavily on Medicaid funding, is often unrecognized. Children’s health needs greater investment, not less.

Getty Images, FS Productions

Last year, my daughter’s elementary school science teacher surprised me with a midday phone call. During a nature center field trip, my eight year old fell off a balance beam and seriously hurt her arm. I picked my daughter up and drove straight to the children’s hospital, where I knew she would get everything she needed. Hours later, we were headed home, injury addressed, pain controlled, appropriate follow-up secured, and her arm in a cast after x-rays revealed fractures across both forearm bones.

That children’s hospital, part of a regional academic medical center, is thirty minutes away from our home. Its proximity assures me that we have access to everything my kids could possibly need medically. Until this year, I took this access for granted. Now, as the structure of the classroom yields to summer’s longer, more freeform days, some of the nation’s most important programs scaffolding kids’ health could collapse under the pressure imposed by proposed legislative budget cuts. As a pediatric doctor and as a parent, slashing Medicaid concerns me the most.


Pediatric funding, availability, and access represent America’s biggest current challenges. Proposed cuts negatively impact individual children. But all kids suffer with diminished availability and accessibility of pediatric healthcare. Threats to children's healthcare started simmering long before this Congress convened and this presidential administration took office, but the size and scope of the cuts in the House draft budget have made that threat existential.

While Medicaid most visibly serves under-resourced individuals and communities, it also bolsters services and institutions that benefit everyone, especially children. Though my family has private insurance coverage through my employer, my kids would not be able to access the depth and breadth of care available without Medicaid, which directly and indirectly supports pediatric programs and professionals.

The risk to children’s hospitals, which rely heavily on Medicaid funding, is often unrecognized. These hospitals, only 1% of all hospitals nationally, represent a lifeline for children, providing primary care, subspecialty medical access, and community programs for children and families of all socioeconomic backgrounds. By contrast, community hospitals comprise nearly 85% of hospitals in the U.S. and are increasingly unlikely to offer pediatric-specific care.

In political battles over Medicaid funding, people obscure the larger but essential question in medicine: should every child have healthcare? On the one hand, the answer is obvious. Pediatricians know every child requires medical access, parents want their children to have what they need, and the American Academy of Pediatrics believes that “the United States can and should ensure that all children, adolescents, and young adults from birth through the age of 26 years who reside within its borders have affordable access to high-quality comprehensive health care.”

Yet since 2008, the number of pediatric inpatient units in general hospitals has declined by nearly 30% and inpatient pediatric beds outside of children’s hospitals decreased by almost 20%. A disconcerting number of hospitals, especially those in rural areas, face full closure. Over the last fifteen years, more hospitals have closed than opened.

As a pediatrician trained in neonatal critical care, I’ve watched with alarm as pediatric units and neonatal-perinatal services constrict faster than adult services and programs. This isn’t because of a lack of demand; in fact, demand for pediatric-specific care has only increased. In areas where there is no pediatric care available, families must go without or travel far for what they need, sometimes spending hours in transit and even crossing state lines. More cuts will only exacerbate that trend.

Increasing gaps in care and coverage mean that emergency medical services and medical providers without extensive pediatric expertise are seeing more children. But this is not an adequate substitute for pediatric experts. Children are not small adults, neither anatomically nor physiologically.

Clinicians who predominantly care for adults can be fooled by pediatric patients. In fact, interventions that heal adults may harm children. Consider extremely high blood glucose levels in patients with diabetes. An adult’s sugar might normalize with rapid intravenous fluid boluses, whereas a child is at risk for brain injury without carefully calculated fluid administered over time. Averting medical danger means recognizing and responding to subtle signs and changes that a pediatric specialist can spot.

Children’s health needs greater investment, not less. Our children embody our greatest potential. To fully realize that potential, it’s time for our national budget to cultivate, not decimate, investment in children’s health—the core of individual and national possibility.

Dr. Brooke Redmond is a neonatal critical care physician at the Yale School of Medicine and a Yale Public Voices fellow of the Op-Ed Project. The views expressed are her own.

Read More

Why Blue States Had Better Get Busy Gerrymandering

United States of America USA 2024 Presidential Election Results Map in red and blue

Getty Images

Why Blue States Had Better Get Busy Gerrymandering

Michelle Obama famously advised Democrats, "When they go low, we go high." This is advice that Democrats no longer can afford to heed if they have any hope of helping to save American democracy.

That fact is evident if they are going to resist President Trump’s plan to get red states like Texas, Missouri, and Florida to redraw their congressional districts in advance of the 2026 midterm elections. As the AP reports, “At Trump’s urging, Texas Republicans are looking to redraw congressional maps to favor GOP candidates during a 30-day special legislative session…. Trump has said he wants to carve out five new winnable GOP seats.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Executive Order on NIL Is a Symptom, Not a Cure, for College Sports Chaos
running field during daytime

Executive Order on NIL Is a Symptom, Not a Cure, for College Sports Chaos

President Trump’s executive order of July 24th targeting college athletes’ NIL rights, depending on the yet to be determined specifics, will play heavily into the future of higher education, amateurism, and the civic role of sports in America.

The White House described the order as a response to an “out-of-control, rudderless system” and emphasized the need to “restore order” and preserve the educational and developmental benefits of college athletics

Keep ReadingShow less
Trump’s Executive Order Targets Civil Rights and Academic Freedom in Higher Education
people standing and taking photo during daytime
Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

Trump’s Executive Order Targets Civil Rights and Academic Freedom in Higher Education

This essay is part of a series by Lawyers Defending American Democracy where we demonstrate the link between the administration’s sweeping executive actions and their roots in the authoritarian blueprint, Project 2025, and show how these actions harm individuals and families throughout the country.

Trump’s Attack on Civil Rights and Academic Freedom in Higher Education

Keep ReadingShow less
Migrant Children: Political Pawns in U.S. Border Policy Debate
Crime, immigration and the peaceful transfer of power
Eskay Lim / EyeEm

Migrant Children: Political Pawns in U.S. Border Policy Debate

WASHINGTON — Republicans have warned against the sex trafficking risks migrant children face when illegally crossing the southwest border. Democrats have countered that their concerns lie in hypocrisy.

“Democrats are standing with survivors, while Republicans are shielding abusers,” said U.S. House Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa, referencing President Donald Trump’s efforts to block the full release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Keep ReadingShow less