Dr. Marvin Singleton, a Republican who spent 13 years as a Missouri state senator, worries about many of the policies he sees coming out of Washington, D.C. these days.
Of course, the retired ear, nose and throat doctor is concerned about federal cuts to Medicaid spending, which could leave millions of Americans without insurance and strain hospitals, nursing homes and home-based care programs that senior citizens rely on.
But Singleton, 85, who now lives in a retirement community in Overland Park and was recently elected to the Kansas Silver- Haired Legislature, is also concerned about cuts to food assistance programs and economic policies like tariffs and tax cuts that he fears will push up prices.
“Everything has ramifications on aging individuals,” he said, “and those individuals who are on fixed incomes get hurt the worst.”
Singleton is not alone. Many advocates working to help senior citizens in the Kansas City area worry, too. A growing population of older low-income adults, they said, already struggles to find health care, pay rent and afford food.
In Missouri, almost 10 percent of the state’s 1.1 million residents 65 years old or older live below the poverty level, and 22 percent receive food assistance. In Kansas, 8.5 percent of the state’s 510,000 seniors live below the poverty level.
“We do not have the infrastructure to meet the needs of the region’s aging population at this moment,” said Jeron Ravin, president and CEO of Swope Health, a safety-net health clinic in Kansas City that has made improving that infrastructure one of its priorities.
And that’s the situation before provisions in new federal legislation, President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” go into effect.
That legislation will cut $911 billion in spending on Medicaid over the next decade and trim $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), causing an estimated 22 million households to lose all or part of their food assistance.
All of that will hurt low-income seniors and the long-term care facilities, health care providers and community organizations that they rely on, senior advocates said.
“We’re in crisis now,” said Janet Baker, executive director of KC Shepherd’s Center, which provides meals and other support to older, mainly low-income adults. “We can’t meet the need that we already have, and that need is just going to grow.”
Growing older populations
In both Missouri and Kansas, older adults make up a growing portion of the populations.
A recent survey of older Missourians found that almost one-third of respondents couldn’t access the health care they needed, often because it cost too much or they couldn’t find a provider in their area. And at least three in 10 said they didn’t have enough money to afford healthy meals.
“We’ve seen this coming for a long time based on demographics and population shift,” said Rachel Ohlhausen, director of program partnerships with Jewish Family Services, “and we haven’t seen federal dollar investments that match.”
In fact, since Trump returned to office in January, the opposite has happened.
Funding has been slashed for safety-net programs like Meals on Wheels and transportation services to help older adults get to the doctor or the grocery store. Area agencies like KC Shepherd’s Center and Jewish Family Services have been forced to turn down requests for help from seniors and their families.
Food pantries and meal sites, meanwhile, are also struggling to help food-insecure seniors as federal food aid from the U.S. Department of Agriculture also experiences steep cuts. And affordable housing for seniors is a growing need.
According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, people 50 years or older represent the fastest-growing group experiencing homelessness. The organization predicts that the group will triple in size by 2030.
In Kansas City, Swope Health will break ground Aug. 7 on a development at 5900 Swope Parkway designed to include 200 units of senior affordable housing, along with senior health and dental clinics.
But Ravin said plans for the project, called Swope Health Village, may be curtailed by federal funding cuts, which will likely take money away from community health clinics like Swope by reducing the number of patients covered by Medicaid and potentially increasing the number who need free care.
In addition, he said, the donations required to complete future phases of the project will be harder to come by.
“The question is, due to these cuts, will the project, instead of being completed within five years, take 10 years or 15 years?” Ravin said. “All safety-net providers are likely to be less financially secure. Philanthropy is going to have more of us asking them for support than ever. And, you know, the well is only so big.”
Impact on care for seniors
Across the spectrum, health providers are expecting to feel the effect of cuts to Medicaid funding.
The new federal law will reduce the number of people who can receive Medicaid, the government-funded health insurance program, by adding work requirements and more frequent eligibility checks. Some of those requirements could be especially burdensome for seniors, advocates said.
The law also shifts more of the program’s costs, which have always been jointly funded by state and federal taxes, to states. Finding those dollars in Missouri and Kansas will probably be difficult.
In addition to federally qualified health clinics like Swope that rely heavily on revenue from patients covered by Medicaid, safety-net hospitals like University Health in Kansas City expect to lose revenue. And so will long-term care facilities like nursing homes, which already have faced headwinds in recent years.
Medicaid covers 65 percent of residents in Missouri nursing homes and 58 percent in Kansas nursing homes.
During the COVID pandemic, long-term care facilities became ground zero for deaths because the virus so easily spread in close quarters, and residents’ health and age made them more vulnerable.
Many patients moved out of the facilities as well, resulting in empty beds and, in some cases, closed doors.
This article first appeared on Beacon: Kansas City and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Suzanne King Raney is The Kansas City Beacon’s health reporter.
