Please tell us how you, your family or your community has benefited from Medicaid coverage for dental care, vision care, and transportation assistance: My community needs all the above benefits, dental and vision are very important to the whole health of an individual. Transportation assistance will impact the community not only for the client that will be unable to attend appointments due to no transportation but it will impact the business that are offering transportation to individuals using Medicaid as payment for the service and that will lead to increase in unemployment as those businesses will be force to lay off.

Please tell us how eliminating these benefits would affect you, your family, or your community: Low income families already have to choose health care, medications, or how much food am I able to purchase this day, week, or month. We are the richest country in the world and it is hard to believe that we have such high poverty and homeless numbers. All the politicians living in their castle on top of the hill need a reality check of how day to day life is for the average family. For low income families Medicaid is the only way they could ever receive dental care or vision care, and transportation is their only way to health care appointments. This is the only health care insurance they have, they can not afford any thing else and the Market Place insurance is a joke. With out good dental care you loose teeth, no teeth you can not eat healthy, if your not eating healthy your physical health declines, teeth become infected and can lead to a coma if the infection enters the blood stream, self confidence lowers and depression can occur, no vision care and individual will be unable to thrive with a decline in the ability to see. You try closing your eyes and function for the day. I know that a large amount of funds are spent on Medicaid coverage, I get that, but you have to look at the long term fall out of not having these benefits.