Please tell us how you, your family or your community has benefited from Medicaid coverage for dental care, vision care, and transportation assistance: -Eliminating these costs enables members to better afford their other expenses such as co-pays and other medical bills.
-Also for families with multiple children it ensures all children get the dental and vision care they deserve despite the ability for their parent to pay all the heavy costs of multiple children. By eliminating these costs parents can spend those extra funds on other things the children need such as, daycare, food expenses, utilities, etc.
-There are elderly members who rely on long term care to take care of themselves. They utilize dental, vision, and transportation sometimes more frequently than other generations and most live on a strict budget monthly between their SSI payments. Most will not be able to afford their long term care and heavy cost of medication and now if they must pay for dental and vision costs as well.
-I believe preventative care is key in saving on health care costs for the patients and the state. People who lose their dental, vision, and transportation care will not be able to afford preventative care in these categories. I believe people’s health will decrease and health care cost will increase.

Please tell us how eliminating these benefits would affect you, your family, or your community: As a health care provider I know breaking down barriers for patients is key in prevention, appointment adherence, and better outcomes. One of the key barriers we see in patients is cost and transportation is a close second. The fact is if someone can’t afford something they must go without. I don’t believe it is smart on the states behalf to eliminate paying for these services. Health care will always be costly but eliminating these services will not only cause people to need more costly follow-up care as well as costing the state more money in the long run, people will be more unhealthy because of it. And as we all know, two wrongs don’t make a right.