Intellectual and developmental disability services brace for potential
Medicaid cuts
[March 29, 2025]
By Erin Drumm and Medill Illinois News Bureau
SPRINGFIELD — Intellectual and developmental disability service
organizations are bracing for potential cuts to Medicaid and Medicare
from the federal government under congressional Republicans and
President Donald Trump.
About 3.9 million Illinoisans are enrolled in Medicaid. Of that total,
44% of Medicaid recipients are children, 9% are seniors and 7% are
adults with disabilities, according to the Illinois Department of
Healthcare and Family Services.
“We’re very concerned. We don’t see what the path is right now,”
Illinois Association of Rehabilitation Facilities CEO Josh Evans CEO
said. “And so our mission is to continue to educate our members of
Congress that this is not just a program that is ripe with payments,
it’s serving people.”
IARF is an association of community-based providers that serve children
and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities and serious
mental illnesses in Illinois. Community providers focus on inclusion in
a smaller community that offers more independence when providing care
and some community providers help their residents find employment.
“I’m going to do whatever it is that I can do, but I can’t come up with
$8 billion to keep a federal program going in my state,” Gov. JB
Pritzker said in an interview with The Contrarian last week. “I can
spend hundreds of millions of dollars to try to provide free healthcare
for people who are most acute, but people are going to die because of
what they’re doing.”
Prtizker proposed increased funding in the developmental disabilities
division at the Department of Human Services, DHS, in his proposed 2026
fiscal year budget. This would include funding to continue placements of
individuals who qualify and want to live in community-based settings and
for new placements under a 2011 federal court order the state has
struggled to comply with.
The Ligas Consent Decree requires states to provide care options in
integrated community settings for Illinoisans with intellectual and
developmental disabilities who request community-based services.
Despite Trump’s claim that he would not make cuts to Medicaid,
congressional Republicans’ budget resolution would almost certainly
result in shrinking funding for the program.
Trump has vowed not to cut Medicaid benefits, but he has also said his
administration will go after “waste and fraud” and cited tens of
billions of “improper payments” in entitlement spending as the target
for trims.
“You need to be careful in terms of how you’re looking at Medicaid,
whether it’s focused on ways you can try to eliminate fraud, abuse and
improper payments, which we all support, by the way, (but) major
substantive changes to Medicaid will have a downstream impact on
disability services,” Evans said.
Service providers worry the budget cuts proposed in a United States
House budget resolution could jeopardize access to medical care for
people with disabilities in Illinois and across the United States who
rely on Medicaid. The budget proposal calls for $2 trillion in budget
cuts, making it likely that Medicaid and Medicare will be impacted,
Evans said. All 14 Illinois Democratic House members of Illinois’
congressional delegation voted against the resolution.
“I think some people assume that the cut automatically equals cost
savings, but that isn’t necessarily the case,” said Kelly Berardelli,
CEO of southwest suburban-based disabilities nonprofit Sertoma Star
Services. “Just because the funding is cut doesn’t mean the need is
gone, and a lot of people we serve are from the most vulnerable
populations, so they’re going to still need services and supports.”
Sertoma Star Services serves more than 1,500 children and adults with
intellectual and developmental disabilities in the Chicago area and
Northwest Indiana. The organization receives most of its funding from
Medicaid, and many of the people using their services rely on Medicaid
for access to care.
“Any cuts to Medicaid have the potential to reduce the quality of life
for the people we serve,” Berardelli said.
Evans agreed.
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Adults served by Sertoma Star Services receiving assistance from a
staff member at the Alsip-Merrionette Park Library during the fall
of 2024. (Photo courtesy of Sertoma Star Services)
“Disability services in Illinois are primarily exclusively funded
through Medicaid,” he said. “There’s no private pay, there’s very little
to no Medicare. It’s all Medicaid.”
If access to community-based care is slashed by Medicaid cuts, people
will seek care through institutionalized facilities, which tend to be
large facilities run by the state with a focus on medical care, or in
some cases, be hospitalized. This could cause Illinois to further
violate the Ligas Consent Decree.
According to Berardelli, people with intellectual and developmental
disabilities living at home could lose access to respite care if
Medicaid funding is decreased in Illinois. Respite care is temporary
care from a professional who is not the recipient’s primary caregiver,
which is usually a couple of hours in a day or week.
More than half of those who receive care from Sertoma Star Services live
with a family member over the age of 55, making the threat to respite
care particularly concerning, Berardelli said. If these people cannot
get respite care, they may not be able to live at home and will have to
be placed in institutionalized facilities, more full-time care away from
home.
While some may seek placements at community providers, there are already
long wait times and a shortage of community providers of care for people
with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
“Cuts to Medicaid would, I think, inevitably increase that waiting
list,” Berardelli said. “Progress has been made over the past several
years, and we would definitely see that progress reversed if there were
cuts to Medicaid.”
Behavioral health services would also be impacted as Medicaid helps both
to fund service providers in addition to insurance coverage for services
such as mental health care and addiction treatment.
“The majority of our member organizations who provide behavioral health
services are straight Medicaid,” IARF senior vice president of
behavioral health policy and advocacy Emily Miller said. “Very few
accept private insurance and so you would decimate the community with
these drastic cuts that are being proposed to the Medicaid program.”
Cutting federal funding would also cause many health industries to
compete with one another for funding. If there is a more limited pool of
funding for health provider programs, not every specialized program
would get the funding they need.
In the state fiscal year that ended in June, Illinois received over $20
billion in federal Medicaid funding, which made up about 62% of the
total funding for Medicaid programs in Illinois, according to HFS.
“If there’s a major change where we see a dramatic loss of dollars, that
means we’re going to have to be lobbying against one another in the
healthcare and human services space for a more limited amount of
resources,” Evans said. “We cannot be put in that position.”
Erin Drumm is a graduate student in journalism with
Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media,
Integrated Marketing Communications, and a fellow in its Medill
Illinois News Bureau working in partnership with Capitol News
Illinois.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan
news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds
of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois
Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation. |
