Juliana Stratton: I was my Mom’s Primary Caretaker – and Trump’s Health Care Cuts are Personal.
By Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton
Dementia doesn’t move quickly. It creeps in, taking hold over the course of years. You watch as your loved one starts to forget you in slow motion, losing their grasp on your name, your voice, your face – on reality itself.
There are good days. There are bad days.
That’s how my mother, Velma, spent the last few years of her battle with Alzheimer’s – moving in between the good and the bad days. As her primary caretaker, I was there for all of them, doing what I could to make her comfortable as she fought to hold on to the pieces of the life she had built – the family she raised, the students she taught.
We spent those years going in and out of the hospital. Navigating in-home care. Calling emergency services when we thought the end might be near. Experiencing the slow pain of mourning a loved one who was still there. Grieving together as a family when my mom’s battle finally came to an end.
It was the most challenging time of my life, and I’m grateful that we had access to the care that we needed as a family and the resources needed to ease my mom’s pain.
Because through those years, life kept going. I raised a family. I built a career. I juggled work and bills and appointments, and it never got any easier. I was always treading water, just fighting to keep my family afloat. Without access to the resources we needed, I’m not sure how we would have managed.
That’s why the cuts to health care that Donald Trump has proposed are so deeply personal to me. They’re trying to kick seniors like my mom, people with disabilities, and families off their health care so they can cut taxes for the ultra wealthy. They’re paying for these handouts to the rich on the backs of the middle class – and they have the audacity to call it “big and beautiful.”
Anyone who has watched a loved one suffer through health complications would tell you – it’s lonely. It’s isolating. It’s frustrating. And navigating a convoluted health care and insurance system on top of it all can feel impossible – even without these cuts. There’s nothing “beautiful” about it.
The budget put forth would drastically cut care for some of the most vulnerable Americans. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that 10.9 million Americans would be left uninsured, including millions of my fellow Illinoisans who would be put at immediate risk of losing their health care.
Our families are already struggling under Trump’s reckless tariffs. We’re already feeling the pinch of rising costs at the grocery store. We can’t afford to subsidize tax cuts for the rich with our health, too.
I’ve seen these kinds of cruel cuts before.
It was in the final years of my mom’s life that elected officials in Illinois were trying to cut senior home care and the resources that families like mine depended on. It was coming from both sides of the aisle – it was both the Republican Governor Bruce Rauner, as well as my own state representative, a Democrat.
It was in that moment, watching the news and seeing him sell out families like mine, that I realized I wasn’t willing to wait for someone else to run against him. So I ran for his seat. It was a long-shot – the kind of race that people doubt – but I worked hard to build support, and I won.
And in the years since, I’ve fought against these kinds of dangerous cuts to the services Illinoisans – and Americans nationwide – rely on, helping to expand access to quality health care, including for our most vulnerable communities. That’s the way I’ve led in Illinois, and that’s the kind of leadership we need in the United States Senate, too.
I miss my mom every day.
But when I think of her, I don’t think of her suffering – I think of her strength. I think of her resilience, her joy. I think of her fight, and I carry it with me every single day. That’s the same kind of fight – the same kind of fire – I hope to bring to Washington. And it’s the same kind of fight that I see in the eyes of the millions of Illinoisans and Americans who are standing up to the Trump Administration and saying, “enough is enough.” Together, we will protect our country and the most vulnerable within it.
Juliana Stratton is a candidate for United States Senate and the Lieutenant Governor of Illinois.
