Your Voice Matters! What I Learned at the Joint Session of Congress (by Elena Hung)
Photo of Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, Elena Hung & Congressman Jamie Raskin, all smiling at the camera. Pelosi wears a bright pink suit, Hung wears a light blue dress & yellow necklace, Raskin wears a navy blue suit & striped tie.
Exactly one week after the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted for a budget resolution that would lead to $880 billion cuts to Medicaid, slashing the life-saving program millions of Americans rely on, I was honored to accompany Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi to the Joint Session of Congress as her guest. I appreciated the opportunity to highlight the life-saving role that Medicaid plays for families like mine — families who experience the joys and challenges of caring for a child with complex medical needs and disabilities.
The address was … terrible, horrible, no good, very bad. But that is not what defined my evening.
What I took away from this unique experience is that we are not alone. I met dozens of guests invited by their members of Congress to fight to protect Medicaid across the country by sharing their stories.
I was thrilled to connect with fellow Little Lobbyists mom Alisa Rosillo, who attended as Congressman Mark DeSaulnier’s guest (D-CA). Alisa has been advocating for Medicaid for years, and she is also doing amazing work with Changing Spaces to ensure that adult changing tables are available and accessible to those who need them.
House Democratic leadership invited digital media creators and new media journalists to speak with members of Congress and the guests they invited to the joint session. The Speaker and I did a ton of interviews together. I spoke about how Medicaid saved my family and why it is the reason my daughter Xiomara is thriving. I repeated over and over again that Americans do not want to steal from disabled children to give tax breaks to giant corporations and billionaires, like Musk.
Photo of Speaker Pelosi & Elena Hung sitting on a yellow couch being interviewed by a journalist. The camera filming us & the microphones are visible.
It seemed like every which way I turned, someone was talking about Medicaid. There are so many of us! In addition to disabled children, Medicaid is crucial for the lives of pregnant women, children in low-income families, disabled adults, and seniors. The Kaiser Family Foundation, a trusted nonpartisan source on health care, reports that 1 in 5 Americans, or 21 percent of the U.S. population, relies on Medicaid to stay healthy. And Medicaid covers half the cost of long term care, critical for seniors and people with disabilities of all ages.
Medicaid is crucial health care. Our work continues. What can we do? We must speak out on Medicaid as much as we can. We must tell everyone we know, especially those in Republican districts, to call their members of Congress.
I know that telling our stories matters. In 2017, I was home watching the news about the ACA repeal and I was worried, scared, and angry. I was not hearing stories like ours told; I was not hearing our disabled children represented. So my friends and I took advantage of the fact that we were a 30-minute train ride from the Capitol, and we showed up with our disabled children to talk about what is possible when we have access to quality health care and what is at stake without it. I can assure you, our voices can make a difference!
I invite you to get involved and share your Medicaid story with us. We will help you get your story heard. Please reach out to Shannon Hope Dingle, our Community Engagement Associate.
Photo taken at the reception before the joint session. L to R: Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, Alisa Rosillo, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi & Elena Hung.
Elena Hung is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Little Lobbyists.