The letter below has been issued to Ohio’s three U.S. Representatives—Troy Balderson, Joyce Beatty, and Mike Carey—with co-signatures from 100 of our members.

We urge you to copy and paste the below message, customize it however you’d like, and then send it to the members of Franklin County’s Congressional delegation using the links above.

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Nonprofits and the 20,000 people who work in the sector in Franklin County are doing more than just caring for people; our nonprofits are meeting our region’s most critical needs at a time of tremendous growth.

We cannot afford to disinvest in this Region now.

But that is what the U.S. House is on the cusp of doing to our community, and to communities large and small across the country.

1. We have to preserve Medicaid. The $700 billion in Medicaid cuts would be a disinvestment in hundreds of thousands of Ohioans, which would make the work of helping people harder rather than easier for each of our members. If someone loses healthcare access, they are then more likely to need support from other areas within the health and human services sector: It becomes harder to hold onto a job when you don’t have the medical care that you need; it becomes harder to pay the rent when you don’t have the medical care that you need; it becomes harder to get your child to school when you don’t have the medical care that you need.
   
   Furthermore, the cuts to Medicaid could have uniquely devastating consequences in Ohio, where Medicaid expansion could be jeopardized based on proposed state budget language still being debated.
2. We have to preserve SNAP. SNAP is one of our most effective tools to help people and the nonprofits that serve them. SNAP works most efficiently to prevent hunger as a fully funded part of the federal safety net. The proposal being debated in the U.S. House would undermine that system and shift unsustainable costs and burdens onto states, local governments, and charitable food networks already stretched dangerously thin. That enormous cost-shift would cripple state budgets and force state legislatures to make impossible choices that would lead to unnecessary hunger and hardship rather than health and opportunity.

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Now is not the time to disinvest in our communities. Given the economic uncertainty ahead, now is not the time to take healthcare and food away from people who need it. A wide array of experts is warning of heightened chances of a recession in the year ahead, including Columbus’ largest employer, JP Morgan Chase. A staggering 39% of Franklin County households already struggle to cover basic needs, including food, housing, healthcare, childcare, and transportation, according to a recent report by RISE Together. Taking away Medicaid and SNAP would only aggravate these issues, increasing the percentage of Franklin County residents facing hardship.

These cuts and their ripple effect across our economy would drive a surge of demand for the services that health and human services nonprofits provide, at the very same time that federal resources for nonprofits are being taken away. This would further strain a sector of our economy that has been overburdened with high demand and insufficient resources since the pandemic began. Instead of getting people the services they need to maximize their human potential, we would be creating new, prolonged, and costly challenges for people and the communities trying to serve them. The inefficiencies this perfect storm would create are impossible to quantify.

Access to health care and healthy meals ought not be partisan. It’s certainly not a Democratic or Republican issue to Ohioans in all 88 of our counties that are in jeopardy of these disinvestments in the months ahead. But it’s not too late. It is imperative that we cross political lines to ensure Ohioans have access to healthcare by supporting Medicaid and SNAP.

We urge our representatives in Congress to reject cuts to Medicaid and SNAP and to prioritize investments in programs that help all Ohioans achieve their full potential.

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