Working parents don’t need survey data to tell them our nation is facing a serious child care crisis. They are reminded every time they pay their child care bill that often exceeds even the high cost of rent. Expectant parents learn about it when they add their names to long waitlists even before their child is born. Their firsthand experience is backed up by data.
State-by-state fact sheets from the Economic Policy Institute finds child care is more expensive than rent in 17 states and Washington D.C., showing that child care is one of the biggest expenses families face.
Like other low wage workers, people who are self-employed or work for small businesses, child care professionals often lack access to employer-sponsored health insurance. Medicaid expansion helps fill the coverage gap –more than 1 in 4 child care professionals are able to meet their health needs thanks to Medicaid.
Our new brief, Medicaid is a Critical Support for the Early Childhood Education Workforce, developed with our partners at CLASP and the National Association for the Education of Young Children looked at the role of Medicaid in supporting working families and child care professionals. It also includes state-by-state data on the share of child care professionals covered by Medicaid in 34 states (map below).
This is mainly due to the success of Medicaid expansion. As we’ve seen with other low-wage professions in the U.S., states that have not expanded Medicaid to low-income adults have nearly four times the rate of uninsured child care workers compared to expansion states.
Medicaid helps parents go to work with the peace of mind of being able to entrust their children to the care of a healthy, qualified and capable adult. Study after study shows that rolling back federal Medicaid match or adding work reporting requirements (unnecessary red tape) to the expansion would cause more of these adults to become uninsured. A new analysis by Urban Institute estimates that around 5 million adults in the expansion population would lose coverage under a proposed federal work reporting requirement. This would certainly impact many parents and early childhood professionals.
While many state and national leaders have looked for ways to boost access to affordable, high-quality child care, the Administration and Congress are considering changes that will make it harder for parents to find and afford care for their infants and children while they are at work. We are talking about plans to gut Head Start, cut Medicaid and impose federal work reporting requirements, among a range of others.
As the Administration contemplates new ways to increase the national birth rate it should take a closer look at how proposals moving through Congress would make it harder for couples to afford to bring children into the world.