GOP funding cuts will create lifelong implications of untreated illnesses.Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get The Daily Prospect Monday through Friday. [link removed]

[link removed]

**DECEMBER 9, 2025**

Click to read this email in your browser. [link removed]

The GOP is trying hard to spin how badly their health care policies are already harming children. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis summed up their line of reasoning, if you can call it reason, when he said people under 50 years old don’t really need comprehensive insurance. But that’s a lie, as doctors, parents, and everyone else knows. More kids will die unnecessarily; more kids will be swept into the foster system. 

Tomorrow is **Human Rights Day** [link removed], a celebration of the **Universal Declaration of Human Rights** [link removed]. Article 25 promises the following: 

1. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

2. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Eleanor Roosevelt spearheaded the declaration, which the UN General Assembly proclaimed as a common standard for all nations and peoples on December 10, 1948. From the state of health care and the treatment of children in America these days, you wouldn’t know the US had been involved at all.

**–Whitney Curry Wimbish, staff writer**

[link removed]

South_agency/iStock

Trump’s Health Care Cuts Are a War on Children [link removed]

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 [link removed] of any child population. 

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 [link removed] 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.

Even before cuts to Medicare [link removed] and Medicaid in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, millions of children were tossed out of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The end of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies put in place in 2021 means that at least half a million more children will lose their marketplace coverage, according to Georgetown University [link removed]. Congress is holding votes this week to extend those subsidies that are not expected to pass.

Continue reading this story [link removed]

prospect.org/donate

****ON OUR SITE****

What are the risks of a financial crash in the coming year? Let us count the ways [link removed].

To understand the tech mindset is to see that the ultimate goal is domination. Silicon Valley elites apply a different standard [link removed] to themselves because they believe that they deserve a different set of rules.

[link removed]

Read more about the [link removed]

IDEAS, POLITICS, and POWER [link removed]

that shape the world around us at [link removed]

prospect.org [link removed]

Copyright (c) 2025 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.**The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States**
You are receiving this newsletter because you have signed up for our service.
To opt out of American Prospect membership, donation or advertising messaging, click here [link removed].
To manage your newsletter preferences, click here [link removed].
To unsubscribe from all American Prospect emails, including newsletters, click here [link removed].

[link removed]

[link removed]

[link removed]

[link removed]

[link removed]

Sent to: [email protected]

Unsubscribe [link removed]

The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States