Latest news with #MassachusettsLeagueofCommunityHealthCenters
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
A ‘historic battle': Mass pols protest Medicaid cuts in ‘Big Beautiful Bill'
When you're talking about a sprawling federal program like Medicaid, whose cost runs to the billions of dollars, it's easy to get bogged down in the numbers. In Revere on Tuesday, Dr. Michael Curry wanted to talk about people instead: The tens of millions, including thousands in Massachusetts, who have benefited from the joint state-federal health care program that dates to the headiest days of the civil rights era. There's the middle-aged woman from Southeast Massachusetts who lives with chronic pain and post-traumatic stress disorder. She used MassHealth, as Medicaid is known in the Bay State, to connect with a local health center that helped her with her problems, Curry, the president & CEO of the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers, reflected. Or the older man from Boston, living with diabetes, who needs access to care and medication to manage his chronic health condition. Without them, he's too dizzy to walk without two canes to support him, and he could end up in a hospital emergency department after a bad fall. 'This is real stories,' Curry said. And those are the people — and many more like them — who stand to lose if the deep Medicaid cuts included in President Donald Trump's domestic policy mega-bill become the law of the land, Curry and a cadre of the state's Democratic politicians warned Tuesday. They included Gov. Maura Healey, Democratic U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, state Sen. Lydia Edwards, D-3rd Suffolk, and Revere Mayor Patrick M. Keefe Jr. To deliver the message, they gathered at Cambridge Health Alliance's Revere Care Center, which provides critical services to its community, with many patients on Medicaid. As it's currently written, the bill that passed the U.S. House by a single vote last week would reduce Medicaid spending by nearly $700 billion over a decade, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office. That would cost the state's health care system $1.75 billion, affecting 250,000 people statewide, according to the Healey administration. 'This is not, as they would describe it, a scalpel — we've heard that term before — a scalpel to the problem," Healey said. 'It really is just a blunt-force axe. And it's going to fall on a lot of people here in Massachusetts and a lot of people around this country. People will get hurt and people will die. And it will raise costs for everyone else.' The bill still has to clear the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate, where lawmakers are eyeing further changes to the legislation. If that happens, the bill will require further action by the House before it can be sent to Trump for his signature. Republicans can only afford to lose three votes if they hope to pass the bill by a simple majority. Markey, who sits on the Senate's Health Committee, has cast the fight over the bill as a 'historic battle.' 'This is going to be the defining battle over the Trump administration's 'Make America Sick Again' agenda, and whether or not Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are going to be successful in implementing this gutting of essential health care programs for our nation,' the Malden pol said. Kennedy helms the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which has oversight of Medicaid and Medicare, two of the nation's three third-rail social safety net programs. With its suite of tax cut extensions, reductions to food aid, and other spending cuts, the bill is the 'greatest transfer of wealth — from just one piece of legislation — from the poorest Americans to the richest Americans ever before in U.S. History," Warren said. 'Think about that: These guys are actually out there making history by taking away from hardworking families, from people down on their luck, from seniors, from little babies, so that a handful of billionaires and corporate CEOs can get more giveaways from the government,' Warren continued. 'That is the Republican plan. Billionaires win, everyone else loses.' And for Curry, that once again comes down to faces, and even his own family's history. Growing up in Roxbury, his mother, a housekeeper, depended on MassHealth coverage because her job didn't come with health benefits, he said. And she couldn't afford to provide them on her own. So many others on MassHealth have a similar story. They're working full-time or part-time, or they're not working at all because they're caregivers, he said. " So as we talk about fraud, waste and abuse, as we talk about changes in Medicaid policy, I want to bring a face to that," he said. Mass. Rep. Trahan's 'Les Miz' moment on Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' | Bay State Briefing Mass. budget debate points to a subtle but seismic shift on Beacon Hill | John L. Micek From Baker to Ballot: Republican Mike Kennealy makes his pitch for governor | Bay State Briefing Read the original article on MassLive.
Boston Globe
5 days ago
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Breath after death: Remembering George Floyd
Like Emmett Till and the Tulsa Race Massacre. Like Fred Hampton. Like Amadou Diallo. Like Breonna Taylor. George Floyd died, and we cried and raged. Momentarily, we changed until the memories faded. Promises were made, but they were just band-aids to cover our pain and shame, to carry us over as we slid back into the reigns of what it means to make America great again. There was no racial reckoning, it was a beckoning, a calling to inch closer to progress. Five years later, what do we see: regress. Five years ago, I stood at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in South Minneapolis where Floyd was murdered, where former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. His call for his mother — both a meditation and prayer — were his dying words and an incantation to heal. Advertisement Instead of healing, we're reeling. We live in an American chapter that seeks to destroy truth and uphold supremacy. Anything that mentions race, gender, or orientation is being targeted. To acknowledge racism, in our government's eyes, is to be anti-American. Advertisement 'When you look at the movement after George Floyd's murder and the movement to re-elect Donald Trump, what does it say about us that we have not answered the charge to wipe out racism,' says Michael Curry, NAACP board member and CEO of the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers. 'We have let the movement for justice and equality get co-opted and called reverse discrimination.' To remember police brutality was always woven into the fiber of American practices is to also recall backlash comes with every uprising. Reconstruction. Jim Crow. The Civil Rights Movement. Reverse redlining and racist lending. Racism, the remix. 'People don't want to see the truth anymore, because it's traumatizing,' Curry said. 'It's more comfortable when we don't have to reconcile with the fact that someone would have that much hatred in their heart.' Police The Justice Department dropped consent decrees in Minneapolis and in Louisville, Kentucky, where Breonna Taylor was killed in her home. Will Worcester and it's Hodan Hashi was 13-years-old when Advertisement Now, she, like me, like so many, is weary. We live in the back-and-forth of hope and heartbreak when we take account of the pain we carry and pass on, even as we fight to change things. 'At the federal level, we are in more danger than we were five years ago,' she says. 'I was told if I do well in school, get a degree, get a career, and check all of the boxes, I was told we would be fine. Now, I am 26. I did that. I have a career, I'm stable. But I'm also constantly in a state of survival. How do you feel safe when it feels like your very existence is under attack at all times?' Five years ago, at Floyd's funeral, tears welled as the Rev. Al Sharpton spoke about our suffering. 'The reason we could never be who we wanted to be and dreamed of being is you kept your knee on our neck,' Sharpton said of America. In a country where our Justice Department's civil rights division is focusing less on racism and equity and more on destroying diversity, fighting against brutality and injustice requires a masterclass in navigating gaslighting and violence. We have a president who falsely claims DEI efforts hurt white people, disappears immigrants and citizens, and is defunding education, the arts, and humanities in order to reshape culture in his image. Safety doesn't live here. Ron Harris was chief resilience officer of Minneapolis when I met him the day of Floyd's funeral. Since then, he ran for Congress and led the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign in Minnesota. When Donald Trump won, he needed to rest. Advertisement 'People are exhausted. We need to train up the next generation of leaders. A choir can carry a single note for an hour because there are enough people to compensate for those who need to catch their breath.' Now, he's a strategic consultant. Organizers pushed for accountability and did the work, he says. But we have to build movements that are sustainable outside of federal dollars, 'We need resources that can't be taken away with the stroke of a pen and the change of an agenda,' he says. 'What gives me hope is often times when the pendulum swings this far the other way, it is evidence of a reaction to progress. In these moments, leaders are born.' For Hashi, hope is found in community. 'I feel like I have people I can talk to and go to for support. That's what I try to hold on to, the people that keep me going.' The people . We must remember one another in our shared humanity and in the need to protect our personhood. 'Mama, I'm through,' Floyd called. He reached for the memory of her love and support. He wasn't just through, he was a through line connecting us to past, present, and promises to still be kept. Hope lies in memory of the folks we fight to remember, the people we work to be remembered by, and and for everyone, we pray, to never become an American goodbye. Advertisement Jeneé Osterheldt can be reached at
Boston Globe
24-04-2025
- Health
- Boston Globe
Brockton Neighborhood Health Center lays off 65 people
Also adding to the center's financial strain, Celli said: a series of recent disruptions to health care institutions in Brockton's region, including the shuttering of 'There were a number of ways in which we and others stepped in to help, but sometimes that also created some additional burden that was hard to sustain with funding challenges,' said Celli. Advertisement Congressional Republicans have also decimate the center's budget and the communities it serves. Advertisement 'That would really put us in the position to not be able to do the work that we want to do to keep our communities healthy,' said Celli. 'It wasn't reactive in advance of Medicaid being cut. We needed to strengthen our position now, but we're also having to strengthen our position to withstand what might be coming.' Brockton's challenges reflect the troubles facing many community health clinics, said Michael Curry, CEO of the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers. 'It is deeply troubling for a health center like Brockton to be in financial trouble,' said Curry. Potential 'That really makes us inextricably linked with what happens in the Medicaid program,' said Curry. 'If there is a cut to the program ... those would lead to really hard decisions at community health centers beyond what you're seeing now with Brockton.' Community health centers are also grappling with the state's Advertisement 'We're facing it just like other parts of the system,' said Curry. 'The problem for community health centers is we're sort of at the bottom of the totem pole with the crisis.' Maren Halpin can be reached at
