Speech therapist speaks out for those who can't

 4/23/2008 © Florida Health News

Most Florida Medicaid patients who will be affected by proposed cuts in their health coverage are either too young, too old, too sick or too poor to make a personal appeal to lawmakers in Tallahassee. So others are speaking out on their behalf.

Gildar

One is Tampa speech therapist Enid Gildar. Others are executives from hospitals that treat the lion’s share of Medicaid patients.

Gildar, who runs a private practice, estimates that 60 percent of the children her therapists treat are covered by Medicaid. Among the $1.1 billion in proposed budget cuts to health and human services programs is a 20-percent cut in speech pathology, she said. 

On a trip to Tallahassee April 1, Gildar said, she urged lawmakers to take money from sports stadiums and road-building, to raise cigarette taxes – not make deep, painful cuts in programs for children and the disabled. Her arguments didn’t get much traction, she said.

Lawmakers often question the motives of protesting health providers whose incomes are affected by Medicaid cuts. Gildar concedes jobs will be lost, her practice may close, if the cuts go through. "I can get other jobs," she said. "I'll be okay. The children won't."

Every day, Gildar said, she calls or e-mails four or five legislators or their aides and sends e-mails to friends, urging them to do the same. “I’m trying to do my part,” she said. “I can’t sit back and do nothing.”

Neither can executives of the Florida Hospital Association, the Safety Net Hospital Alliance of Florida and the Florida Transplant Survivor’s coalition. They are staging a media event today, delivering 16,500 petitions to the Capitol by ambulance and carrying them inside on a gurney.