By Carolyn Bick
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Amidst significant uncertainty regarding the future of many public programs, including Medicaid and Head Start, Washington Sen. Patty Murray on Tuesday convened a roundtable of community health experts serving a variety of communities who rely on such programs to survive.
Roundtable participants discussed a number of programs that President Donald Trump and his administration, backed by both a Republican-led House and Senate, appear poised to cut, as well as the impact of health agency funding cuts and mass firings at the federal level.
Community organization Neighborhood House serves more than 13,000 people, the organization’s executive director, Janice Deguchi, said. These individuals hail from the area’s refugee, immigrant, low-income, and public housing communities.
A screenshot from the meeting, wherein Janice Deguchi speaks about what Neighborhood House does, and how it relies heavily on Head Start.
In addition to helping elders and people with disabilities in these communities stay in their homes for as long as possible, Deguchi said that of the 429 low-income families with children whom Neighborhood House serves, at least a third of those children have special needs. Thanks to the Head Start program—which is comprehensive, supporting children’s learning and physical and emotional health, Deguchi said—Neighborhood House has been able to meet these needs.
But Head Start does a lot more than just meet the needs of children. It also supports whole families, Deguchi said, including helping parents qualify for teaching positions and connecting families to housing. She said that Neighborhood House has helped unhoused families who have been evicted get both housing and health care, as well as leadership opportunities through the organization’s policy council.
“Head Start … is vital to children’s success and parents’ ability to work, and the children at Neighborhood House, they enter kindergarten prepared and able to self-regulate, they’re able to follow classroom rules,” Deguchi said. “Defunding Head Start would cut a vital lifeline to our nation’s children and families by eliminating a bridge to disability and economic opportunity.”
Though Neighborhood House is able to meet a significant amount of need, there are still 180 more families on the organization’s waiting list. Head Start’s funding is set to run out on June 30, and would impact the 429 families Neighborhood House serves.
Both Deguchi and Dr. Tao Kwan-Gett, the state’s health officer, highlighted the importance of Medicaid for many in the state. It’s the number one thing families call Neighborhood House about, asking how to get access, Deguchi said.
Kwan-Gett said that any cuts or reductions in service will translate into greatest harm for low-income people and rural communities, and that any changes in work requirements will make it significantly harder for people to get insurance. He said that this will ultimately harm everyone’s health, regardless of whether they are on Medicaid.
“This will lead to more people who are uninsured, fewer people who are getting preventive services,” Kwan-Gett said. “Instead of going to primary care providers for health problems, when they’re earlier and easier to treat, people will delay care until they’re sicker, and their health problems are more serious, and end up going to the emergency department for care, which we all know is much more expensive.”
Even though Trump’s cuts haven’t always been successful, it doesn’t mean that the agencies he targeted haven’t felt the impact—and that’s had a ripple effect.
For instance, said Kwan-Gett, the federal government just last month tried to cut $11 billion in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) grants that were allocated for states’ pandemic responses. That included a $140 million grant for Washington.
While Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown, along with attorneys general from 22 other states and Washington, D.C., successfully sued for a temporary restraining order to keep those grants in place, this hasn’t meant state health departments haven’t felt the impact in their work, Kwan-Gett said. It also doesn’t mean that these funds are safe forever.
“We’ve had to interrupt work, and that has been really disruptive,” Kwan-Gett said. “If the cuts go through, we’re really worried about the impacts to our state. It would mean canceling more than 100 vaccine clinics in communities across the state, many of them in low-income and rural areas.”
That would include 35 school-based clinics, anticipated to serve 800 children, he said, at a time when more and more measles outbreaks are cropping up, as well as eliminating positions and teams that help monitor and prevent infections, like measles or bird flu.
The same day Murray held the roundtable, King County reported a fifth case of measles in an infant.
In a state where public health and opportunity are deeply intertwined, the message from local leaders is simple: these programs are not optional. They are lifelines. And the cost of cutting them goes far beyond the balance sheet.
Dear Carolyn Bick, Thank you very much for your informative article about federal cuts to programs such as Medicaid, Head Start, Neighborhood House and the vaccine clinics throughout the state of Washington. It is staggering to learn that the 429 low-income families served by the Neighborhood House have children with “special needs.” You are correct in that these programs ARE lifelines for the people in our communities who need and deserve support.
Thank you for your excellent reporting!