How Medicaid cuts threaten a family's lifeline

Ever since Elijah Maldonado was born at just 29 weeks, he has needed specialty treatments that his family could afford only with publicly funded healthcare.

- BY TYRONE BEASON

JULIANA YAMADA Los Angeles Times

CASSANDRA Gonzalez carries her nephew Elijah Maldonado, who is diagnosed with cerebral palsy.

Diagnosed with cerebral palsy as an infant, he spent his first three months at a public hospital in Orange County, where the family lives.

Now 7, Elijah receives physical and speech therapy among a host of other services paid for through Medicaid. He relies on a wheelchair funded by the government. An assistant paid for with taxpayer dollars makes sure he's safe on the bus ride to and from school.

Each month, he receives a $957 disability check that helps to cover his and his family's living expenses.

Still learning to speak on his own, he uses a Proloquo speech app on an iPad provided by his school to tell his family when he's hungry, needs to use the restroom or wants to play with his favorite toys.

"It's his voice — his lifeline," his aunt and primary caretaker Cassandra Gonzalez says of the app. Her compensation for his in-home care comes from taxpayer dollars too.

Now that lifeline — and much of the government assistance Elijah receives — is at risk of going away.

With hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of cuts to Medicaid and food aid kicking in this fall thanks to the passage of the Republican-backed "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" — on top of earlier cuts imposed by Elon Musk’s White House team, called the Department of Government Efficiency — a host of federally funded healthcare and nutrition programs that serve low-income Americans will be scaled back, revamped with expanded work requirements and other restrictions or canceled altogether if individual states can’t find alternate funding sources.

The budget reduces federal spending on Medicaid alone by about $1 trillion over the next 10 years nationwide, with initial reductions taking effect in the coming weeks.