Trump's Health Care Cuts Are a War on Children

[Celerity]

GOP funding cuts mean that more children will grow up with the lifelong implications of untreated illnesses.

https://prospect.org/2025/12/09/trumps-health-care-cuts-war-on-children/


Even before cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, millions of children were tossed out of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Credit: South_agency/iStock

Here’s a scenario that keeps adoptive and foster parent Sara Pendleton up at night: A child falls ill. The doctor is too expensive. Perhaps the child’s parents reduced or cut their coverage because the subsidies that allowed them to afford health insurance expired. Perhaps she got kicked out of Medicare or Medicaid after the GOP slashed that coverage. Whatever the reason, a policy choice forces mom and dad to keep the child home and hope for the best. The child’s condition worsens. Her parents fear she may die. They take her to the emergency room, their last resort for some treatment. Doctors there give her the medicine she needs. They excoriate the parents, telling them their daughter needed care earlier. Now she has a host of complications that could have been prevented, they say, possibly lifelong ones. Then they call Child Protective Services.

This isn’t just a hypothetical flash of anxiety. Pendleton has seen it happen. She’s fostered dozens of children, including those with disabilities and medical complexities. Children in foster care have the highest rate of chronic conditions of any child population. “I shudder to think about the amount of children who could be taken into the foster care system if they’re marginal enough for the parent to not afford a medication,” said Pendleton, who lives in Biloxi, Mississippi. “Now they go to the hospital, and CPS gets called and says, ‘You were supposed to get this kid medication.’”

Insurance makes it possible for parents to manage a child’s disability, or to keep up with therapy, or even to simply attend to an illness promptly. Children without health insurance are vastly more likely to die if they fall ill, as medical scholars have pointed out for decades. Researchers in 2010 published an analysis of 23 million pediatric hospitalizations, for example, showing that nearly 40 percent of the uninsured children who died would still be alive if they’d had insurance. Death is a uniquely horrific outcome of losing insurance, Pendleton said, but not the only one. A child can also lose her entire family. “We say it all the time because we are foster parents,” she told me. “Death is not the worst thing that can happen when supports are cut.”

The GOP is destroying children's health in multiple ways. Even before cuts to Medicare and Medicaid in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), millions of children were tossed out of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, according to health nonprofit KFF. Between March 2023 and August 2025, 15 percent of child enrollees lost their coverage, amounting to more than six million children. Some states yanked coverage at even higher rates. Montana, for example, dropped 31 percent of child enrollees. Utah, Idaho, Texas, South Dakota, Georgia, Missouri, Florida, Alaska, and Wyoming all dropped more than 20 percent. In Virginia, 11,000 children lost their health insurance in 2025, according to The Commonwealth Institute. This was the by-product of unwinding coverage gains built up during the pandemic period. But the future is likely to be far worse.............

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