Cuts to Medicaid Could Harm Students
January 21, 2025 | Written By: Jessie Mandle
By Anne Dwyer, Hannah Green and Jessie Mandle
With Congress contemplating major cuts to Medicaid, health services provided to school-age children covered by Medicaid could be threatened. Services provided in schools increase access to care for school-age children, who make up nearly one-third of all individuals covered by Medicaid.*
In addition, research has shown that Medicaid-eligible students are more likely to graduate from high school and complete college, enabling them to become productive members of society and even benefit from higher wages in adulthood.
Medicaid also supports students in the following ways:
- Providing access to critical screenings early enough to catch learning disabilities and other barriers to success in school
- Boosting attendance rates and limiting absences due to mental and physical illness
- Providing access to personnel, services and equipment needed to care for students with disabilities
- Funding care provided by local hospitals or community centers directly within or near the school building, which increases access to care, especially in rural areas
Cutting Medicaid through block grants, per capita caps or in other ways directly threatens our nation’s students, as states would struggle to fill in the funding gaps and could be forced to raise taxes, cut other parts of state budgets such as K-12 education funding or slash Medicaid coverage and benefits to cover the shortfall.
Read more about how critical Medicaid is to student success in our new brief, “How Medicaid Supports Student Success.” Want to see the share of children with Medicaid/CHIP coverage in your school district? Check out our interactive charts with state-specific school district data.
*National Center for Education Statistics analysis of 2018-2022 ACS-ED data (based on U.S. Census Bureau 2018-2022 American Community Survey 5-year data estimates).
Anne Dwyer is an associate research professor and Hannah Green is a state health policy analyst at the Center for Children and Families at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. Jessie Mandle is the national program coordinator at Healthy Schools Campaign.
