News — As clinicians on the front line of child health, Estella Alonso, MD, Interim Chair of the Department of Pediatrics, Marcelo Malakooti, MD, MBA, CPE, FAAP, Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer, and Brian Stahulak, DNP, MBA, RN, NEA-BC, Senior VP and Chief Clinical and Nursing Officer, see firsthand the profound role Medicaid plays in ensuring children receive the life-saving care they deserve. Together, they share what Federal cuts could mean to pediatric healthcare in on Medicaid.
As clinicians on the front line of child health, we see first-hand the profound role Medicaid plays in ensuring children receive the life-saving care they deserve.
As policy makers deliberate potential cuts in government spending, we urge all who care about the health and well-being of children to implore them to reject Medicaid cuts that would harm our nation’s most vulnerable patients.
Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) serve as the backbone of children’s healthcare in the U.S., covering almost 40% of all children, including those with complex medical needs. In Illinois alone, nearly 1.5 million children (about half of all children in the state) rely on Medicaid and CHIP. Yet children comprise just 20 percent of the total spending in Medicaid.
Proposed cuts to the Medicaid program would have sweeping effects on access to care for millions of children and families, jeopardizing children’s ability to receive routine check-ups, life-saving treatments, and early interventions that lead to better long-term outcomes and lower healthcare costs. Preventative care in childhood can reduce the burden of chronic diseases in adulthood, ultimately saving the healthcare system billions of dollars. Cuts to Medicaid spending on children will increase chronic diseases and drive-up health care costs for a lifetime.
Each of us joined Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago to provide exceptional medical and behavioral healthcare to every child regardless of their ability to pay. We care deeply for the children and families we serve. The economics of pediatric healthcare are real, but the bigger reality is the lives of the children. Healthy children build healthy communities. This is something that benefits all of us – it is something each one of us should care about.
Medicaid reimbursement already falls woefully short of the cost to provide care. As the top pediatric Medicaid provider in the state, nearly 60 percent of hospitalized children at Lurie Children’s in 2024 were covered by Medicaid. Cuts to Medicaid would jeopardize access to care for some of the most vulnerable children in our community when we know that early access to care improves health and reduces costs.
The impact of potential Medicaid cuts would not be limited to clinical care. Academic medical centers, like ours, will face challenges to invest in other areas critical to pediatrics, such as research and physician training programs. Shortages exist in the U.S. across nearly every pediatric subspecialty, driving a growing gap in access to care. Now is the time to invest in pediatric health, not further threaten its future.
Lurie Children’s and our colleagues in child health across the nation are committed to working with public officials at every level of government to ensure that all children can be healthy, educated, and thrive. We urge everyone – parents, grandparents and civic leaders - to contact policy makers and implore them to protect Medicaid. The decisions they make now will have a crucial impact on the health and well-being of our nation today and for generations to come.
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