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Living under Trump's regime has real costs, and for special needs families harsh realities [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-02-24

Let’s face it, if I could do the last six years over, maybe longer, I probably would have. In 2017, I left a very lucrative industry spot for my dream job here at Daily Kos. With the election of Donald J. Trump, standing up to that nonsense seemed of utmost importance to what I viewed as our future. Fast forward a few years and I’ve become a widow, lost a first home to medical necessity over hospice care, lost a second home to fire, and am back in a job market that is not as conducive as I wish it was, well, what will be will be.

If you had asked me to imagine in 2016 that in 2024 some of the problems I viewed myself as in the right place to battle against would be continuously on my doorstep I just couldn’t imagine it. But welcome to the Trump administration 2.0, and it’s time we talk seriously about the realities families are undergoing right now.

You see, for many of us we are reliant on the good placement and skills of those who handle placement within the group home structure to provide resident-care settings for our loved ones. This is because they require round-the-clock care and their disabilities may not be entirely cognitive but certainly result in them needing help.

My son, Augustus, who I’ve written about many times before is brilliant when it comes to math, the government, social studies. Every time I see him he asks about the Federal Reserve for some reason and keeps his own charts tracking changes. Don’t ask me why. At the same time, he suffers from legal blindness, bipolar, schizophrenia, and autism diagnosis.

As we prepare for what comes next, many of the resources that float for children like him and like our family are quickly being gobbled up or evaporated, re-reviewed, re-evaluated, and some of the providers are openly scared of holding onto a system that provides them matching grant programs. There are pretty open warnings in the water that many of them have concerns about what they do with their SSDI recipients, preferring to move forward with private-pay recipients, or to just stop worrying about any other supplements.

What’s worse is that for administrators, our ability to match the current needs is already outstripped, we aren’t bringing back enough to cover in current expenses as they stand, so needs for major changes result in major expenditures on our side every direction we move.

It doesn’t take too much to realize that we were thin in the last year, but under the new way this is preparing to go we’re under so fast, so hard that it is going to be amazing to see people balance programs. Some state are going to have funding step in and handle the differences. Others won’t. Some are going to be able to follow what Elon and others might want and just take adult-aged disabled individuals into a home despite the safety and management concerns.

The truth is, I fall into the category that simply can’t make it work. I don’t have that ability, so I’m asking for the help of the Daily Kos community if you’d be so kind. I setup a GoFundMe, to help raise in money to cover the delta that we face when it comes to family needs right now. I’m of course grateful for anything that anyone has to grab.

I’m working on some Kindle and Amazon e-books, if you want to know about those please ask (a good example is The Tax Implications of Owning a Demon Zoo, it’s short and designed to be goofy), but everything we can bring in to supplement how I can cover healthcare costs matters a great deal until I can establish new path forward for him.

Thank you so much,

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/24/2305875/-Living-under-Trump-s-regime-has-real-costs-and-for-special-needs-families-harsh-realities?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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