Town Halls are where the action is at, apparently
Plus: Medicaid bill breakdown; DOJ may skip probe of teacher who dragged a nonverbal child down a hallway; Study says accommodations should probably be explained to all students
I was on our local TV news this week and if I had anticipated that, I probably would have put on makeup or gotten out of my pajama pants or something.
But this was the third time I had been to a member of Congress’ town hall meeting in recent months and I didn’t think I would do anything more than listen to what was said and maybe catch a staff member in the hallway to talk about paid family caregivers.
To my surprise, my number was randomly selected and I was able to ask Congresswoman Janelle Bynum (D-Oregon) her position on paid family caregiver legislation in front of the crowd at Lewis & Clark College. This prompted the local news to want to interview me afterwards.
There’s video of our exchange, but it was very echoey in the room and hard to hear so I will summarize it. My arguments will not be unfamiliar to longtime readers of this newsletter:
The social contract is broken. Medicaid services don’t work the way they are supposed to.
Paid family caregivers is the answer to a lot of problems.
People are suffering while politicians sit on their hands.
Bynum seemed open to the idea. More than anything—after being yelled at by several people about the situation in Gaza—she was particularly happy that I had both stated a problem and my proposed solution. (That doesn’t seem to be a common theme in town halls.) I followed up with her staff over email and though it took a a few days, I was able to talk to someone who says they will set up a meeting with her legislative director soon.
The legislation is relatively simple. Just 10 words need to be cut from federal statute to allow paid family caregivers to work personal care hours. Bynum told the crowd she would look into it and disclosed that one of her four children also has special health care needs.
“It’s vitally important that our children get the services that they need. I know as a parent-caregiver, it is hard as hell because you’re alone. Even if you have a partner. It feels very alone,” Bynum said, then asked me to contact her staff so “we can see where we are at in the process and I can advocate for [that.]”
I hope she does.
Medical Motherhood’s news round up
Snippets of news and opinion from outlets around the world. Click the links for the full story.
• From KFF: “Health Provisions in the 2025 Federal Budget Reconciliation Bill”
[This is the best, most detailed resource I’ve come across for explaining the myriad changes that the reconciliation bill proposes. The bill is currently in the Senate where it waits for a vote. The health policy changes include Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and Health Spending Accounts. Click the tabs at the top of the chart to switch between them and separate fact from fiction.]
On May 22, the House passed a budget reconciliation bill that includes significant changes to the Medicaid program and the Affordable Care Act, as well as additional provisions related to Medicare and Health Savings Accounts. This resource summarizes the relevant sections of the House-passed bill and compares the changes to current law. It reflects the final changes to the House Rules Committee Print released on May 19 version.
• From ProPublica: “A Teacher Dragged a 6-Year-Old With Autism by His Ankle. Federal Civil Rights Officials Might Not Do Anything.”
A short video taken inside an Illinois school captured troubling behavior: A teacher gripping a 6-year-old boy with autism by the ankle and dragging him down the hallway on his back.
The early-April incident would’ve been upsetting in any school, but it happened at the Garrison School, part of a special education district where at one time students were arrested at the highest rate of any district in the country. The teacher was charged with battery weeks later after pressure from the student’s parents.
It’s been about eight months since the U.S. Department of Education directed Garrison to change the way it responded to the behavior of students with disabilities. The department said it would monitor the Four Rivers Special Education District, which operates Garrison, following a ProPublica and Chicago Tribune investigation in 2022 that found the school frequently involved police and used controversial disciplinary methods.
But the department’s Office for Civil Rights regional office in Chicago, which was responsible for Illinois and five other states, was one of seven abolished by President Donald Trump’s administration in March; the offices were closed and their entire staff was fired.
The future of oversight at Four Rivers, in west-central Illinois, is now uncertain. There’s no record of any communication from the Education Department to the district since Trump took office, and his administration has terminated an antidiscrimination agreement with at least one school district, in South Dakota.
In the April incident, Xander Reed, who has autism and does not speak, did not stop playing with blocks and go to P.E. when he was told to, according to a police report. Xander then “became agitated and fell to the ground,” the report said. When he refused to get up, a substitute teacher, Rhea Drake, dragged him to the gym.
[…Scott Reed, Xander’s father, said:]“If that was a student” that acted that way, “they would have been in handcuffs.”[…]
• From News-Medical.net: “Children’s understanding of fairness in disability accommodations grows with age”
According to the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, approximately 1 in 6 children in the United States have developmental disabilities which include physical, learning, language or behavior-related disabilities. Students with disabilities often receive accommodations (how students access and learn the same content as their classmates) at school, but teachers rarely explain them to typically-developing classmates.
[…A new study’s] findings showed that with increasing age, children evaluated disability-related accommodations as increasingly fair. Older children also demonstrated greater understanding of how specific accommodations help to address specific needs, which might account for why they judged accommodations as fairer.
[…]These findings may encourage teachers, parents, and service providers to discuss the ways that accommodations address the needs of persons with disabilities.
[…Study author Dr. Nicolette G. Granata said]: My sense of why many teachers feel wary to formally discuss disability in the classroom is because they fear that children won't understand the nuances of the many types of disabilities their classmates may have, or that children might resent their classmates for having certain accommodations, or that pointing out a disability might lead to children treating the disabled classmate negatively. This study demonstrates that even young children generally felt neutral about the fairness of unexplained accommodations for classmates with disabilities, and children who were older — or who expressed an understanding that accommodations addressed people's needs — generally evaluated the accommodations as fair. Thus, this study demonstrates to teachers, parents, and administrators that it might be worthwhile to begin these discussions in elementary school, emphasizing how accommodations work to address the unique needs of persons with disabilities. Children are likely noticing disabilities and accommodations anyway, and are likely curious about the reasons for accommodations, so why not help guide children with accurate and empathic information?[…]
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