Iowa Democrats Bring “Decade of Denied Care” Tour to Cedar Rapids
DES MOINES – Today the Iowa Democratic Party brought the “Decade of Denied Care” Tour to Cedar Rapids, continuing to highlight Medicaid Awareness Month and how the last decade of one-party control has made it harder for Iowans to get the care they need.
Iowans impacted by health care cuts gathered to call out Feenstra’s vote to gut Medicaid and threaten rural hospitals. They also condemned Kim Reynolds’ mismanagement of Iowa’s privatized Medicaid program, which has resulted in thousands of Iowans being denied care, and discussed how health care has suffered under a decade of one-party rule.
“Randy Feenstra, who now wants to be our governor, didn’t just vote for the so-called Big Beautiful Bill — he helped write it. And that law is the largest cut to Medicaid in American history,” said Linn County Supervisor Sami Scheetz. “Think about what that means for Linn County. Those patients don’t stop getting sick. They don’t stop needing their diabetes managed, their blood pressure checked, their kids’ ear infections treated. When they lose their medical home at places like EIHC, they end up in the emergency rooms at St. Luke’s and Mercy — sicker, later, and at far greater cost to everyone. That is not a functioning health care system. That is a system designed to fail working families and overwhelm the hospitals still standing.”
“Here’s the reality: there is nothing beautiful about ripping health care away from more than 100,000 Iowans,” said State Sen. Molly Donahue. “This didn’t start in Washington. This started ten years ago, when Kim Reynolds and Iowa Republicans made the decision to privatize Medicaid. They handed our public health care system over to private, for-profit companies. They promised better care and lower costs. What Iowans got instead was denial after denial, delay after delay, and a system that costs more while delivering less. And today, we are living with the consequences.”
“People like my sister go without their medicine and insulin, put off seeing a doctor until their health is so bad that they need to be seen in the ER or hospital, which in turn raises hospital costs for the rest of us,” said Michele Steepleton, a Cedar Rapids resident who is a caretaker for a family member on Medicaid. “This is the fate of 26,000 people in eastern Iowa who could be kicked off of their health coverage because of this bill … Randy Feenstra voted for this bill in order to give tax cuts to wealthy donors. They sold it as a vote against waste, fraud and abuse. There was no waste in the health care that my sister received. Medicaid literally saved her life.”
“Medicaid made Jenna’s care possible. It gave our life stability and allowed me to visit her every day … [but] after less than two years, the facility put profits over patients and told us we had to relocate,” said Marjie Zach, a Cedar Rapids resident whose daughter relies on Medicaid for a rare brain condition. “That’s the reality of Medicaid in Iowa: too many people in need of care and not enough facilities are willing or able to take Medicaid under our for-profit health care system … I now live in constant fear of my family losing Medicaid coverage under the cuts to health care in the Big Ugly Bill that Randy Feenstra voted for.”
The Republicans running for governor support this health care disaster:
- Randy Feenstra voted to pass Reynolds’ disastrous Medicaid privatization scheme in the state legislature, which has driven up costs, ripped away health care, hurt Iowans with disabilities, and closed rural hospitals.
- In Congress, Feenstra bragged about being a “key author” of his party’s deeply unpopular budget law that threatens health care for 110,000 Iowans and puts at least 23 rural hospitals on the brink of closure, as 117,890 Iowans are seeing their premiums skyrocket.
- Adam Steen praised D.C. Republicans passing the largest Medicaid cut in history and Reynolds privatizing Medicaid, saying “I support everything that Governor Reynolds is doing.”
- Zach Lahn has a history of opposing Medicaid expansion entirely — a position even more extreme than Reynolds’ disastrous privatization scheme.
- Brad Sherman and Eddie Andrews voted to kick thousands of Iowans off Medicaid and made it harder to get health insurance.
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