Blog — The Patient Advocate's Chronicle

A few months ago, I had planned to do a series of posts talking about how this administration was hurting healthcare, specifically children. But it seemed like every other day – no, every other hour – there was another ridiculous policy or proposal. I had to step away from the news to spare my own sanity.

But there is one thing I can’t afford to step away from. None of us can.

Medicaid.

Every organization I am associated with is talking about how to mitigate planned cuts to Medicaid. It would be catastrophically damaging to implement most of what is in the latest House bill, including some pretty steep impacts to state budgets, since cuts to federal funding will have to be made up as much as possible by the states. But today, I am not going to talk about impacts. Lots of people are doing that, and you can find the whole story with a quick Google or AI search (Just make sure you check that the source of your information is legit).

Instead, I want to talk about the program itself.

Way back before I was born, as the media and marketing was in their adolescence, Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, “The medium is the message.” He argued that in communication, the way a message is delivered is just as, if not more, important as the message itself. (Got that from one of my favorite college courses on journalism and politics.)

As with many theories, this one has a broader application beyond the general rules of communication. For our purposes, I would say it is particularly true in healthcare. We already know that trust is a factor in getting messages out and reaching populations that fundamentally don’t trust the healthcare systems. It’s why community health centers are such a good idea and why healthcare professionals often seek to enlist help from religious and community leaders.

But it is bigger than that.