WASHINGTON — As Republicans in Washington, D.C. consider steep cuts to Medicaid, a new report showed the early childhood education workforce in Virginia heavily relies on Medicaid for health care coverage.
The report from the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families notes many child care programs operate as small businesses. And for many, providing employer-sponsored health care is prohibitively expensive. Nearly a quarter of all early child care workers in the Commonwealth are covered by Medicaid.
Emily Moore, senior policy analyst for the nonprofit Voices for Virginia’s Children, said federal cuts could make access to child care more difficult for families.
“Essentially we would just destabilize our child care workforce and leave working parents and their children in the lurch at a time when Virginia has already a growing wait-list of over 10,000 children waiting for child care,” Moore projected. “These federal cuts to programs like Medicaid and Head Start are really going to exacerbate our child care crisis.”
Republicans in Washington are working to make major spending cuts in next year’s budget, totaling $2 trillion. Lawmakers are debating how best to implement the cuts, which likely would need to include Medicaid to meet spending targets.
Many early child care educators face low wages, with the median wage lower than 97% of all other occupations in the U.S. Moore stressed that expanded Medicaid coverage is essential to Virginia’s early childhood education workforce.
“We know how important our child care workers are to the development of our young children in Virginia,” Moore asserted. “Supporting the healthy development of our children is critical to being able to be healthy yourself. Making sure that our child care workers have affordable coverage options means they’ll be able to show up to work every day and continue to care for our children.”
States expanding Medicaid tend to have fewer uninsured early childhood educators, according to the report. Virginia lawmakers approved Medicaid expansion in 2018.
