Yvonne Breidenbach considers the patients she works with her family. She’s a licensed practical nurse at the Hunterdon Developmental Center in Clinton, New Jersey, which provides services to individuals with developmental disabilities.
Breidenbach has spent the last 17 years working with people she considers “like my children, like my brothers and sisters.”
But much of the funding for the center is under threat. That’s because of the cuts to Medicaid in the so-called “big, beautiful bill” making its way through Congress. The hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid will hit the most vulnerable Americans the hardest. That includes her clients at Hunterdon.
Breidenbach, a member of Local 2220 (AFSCME New Jersey), is already concerned about staffing and resource shortages at the center. She says the direct care workers (“we call them living angels”) sometimes have to work double shifts. If funding for places like the center dries up, she says, the quality of life of her patients will go down.
“A lot of them will die,” she says.
Breidenbach’s own member of Congress, Thomas Kean Jr., voted for the bill when it was moving through the House of Representatives.
When asked what she would say to Kean, Breidenbach had a question for him.
“Of all the things that can be cut,” she asks, “why is it that all the focus is going toward the vulnerable population? Is it because they cannot talk for themselves? Because they cannot answer back?”
Anti-union lawmakers want to gut Medicaid and other essential services to pay for tax breaks for their billionaire buddies. But as Breidenbach points out, “The rich already have enough money to live for generations” while for her patients, the care they receive at the center “is the only thing they have.”
Breidenbach says her work “has nothing to do with a political party. It has to do with empathy.”
She wants Kean and others who voted for the bill the first time around to discover their empathy when the bill returns to the House for final passage. The Senate has made many changes — many of them worse than even what the House proposed.
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