Medicaid Helps Human Trafficking Survivors
Beth Jacobs is a human trafficking survivor. Medicaid helps survivors get the care they need. Yet, Congress is considering cuts to Medicaid.
Beth Jacobs understands the trauma of human trafficking because from age 16 to 22, she lived it. Jacobs also understands the struggle most survivors face after they escape: trying to pay for their health problems resulting from their years trafficked.
She has undergone eight angioplasties to heal the damage done to her legs from years of running in high heels. She was unable to get the dental exams necessary after a history of beatings until a local church sponsored her care. She even moved from Arizona to Minnesota because her coverage in Arizona would not cover a necessary bypass in her legs.
“We tell women to rehabilitate themselves and then trip them as they’re walking out the door,” Jacobs said.
Currently in the U.S. Senate, lawmakers are debating whether or not to pass health care legislation that threatens Medicaid expansion, which is one of the main health care services for survivors of human trafficking. Survivors can access Medicaid coverage no matter their age, trafficking history, or country of origin once they are deemed a victim by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Shrinking Medicaid, as proposed by the Senate health care bill, would hurt survivors of human trafficking, both when they reenter society and the years that follow. Survivors struggle to find employment due to criminal records from false arrests resulting from having been coerced into criminal activity by traffickers. So the jobs survivors do find rarely provide the health benefits needed to cover the lasting effects of human trafficking.
Jacobs, now a policy champion for the National Survivor Network, claims that legislators passing anti-human trafficking laws are not doing enough to support survivors after they reenter society.
“[The legislators] don’t get it,” Jacobs says, “They aren’t walking the walk.”
Based on its proposals to Medicaid funding, the current Senate health care legislation fails to support health care coverage for survivors of human trafficking, thus inflicting more harm to some of society’s most vulnerable.
