Related Articles
Lauren Miller Rogen was 22 years old, celebrating her graduation from college the first time she noticed something was happening to her mother, Adele. It was relatively minor: “She repeated herself — she told a story a few times about a friend of hers,” Rogen says. But for Rogen, who had watched Adele care for her own parents as they slowly succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease, it was the potential future that unnerved her.
Within two years, Adele, a first-grade teacher, would be diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s at age 55. By that time, Rogen was living in Los Angeles, and dating her then-boyfriend, the actor Seth Rogen. When the couple married a few years later, Adele’s condition had progressed to the point that it wasn’t clear at their wedding if she even realized who Lauren was. “She knew I was the bride — she kept calling me the bride,” Lauren recalled in Taking Care, a documentary the couple made to raise awareness about the challenges that families face while caring for a person with advancing dementia.
The toll of caring for Adele was hardest on Lauren’s father. “There was a time early on, before we brought care in, where we were like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna lose him first.’ This — caring for her — seemed like it’s literally killing him,” she says. “Without being able to afford outside help, I dread imagining what would have happened.” The couple went on to found a nonprofit, Hilarity for Charity, that disburses grants to offset the cost of caring for a person with dementia.
“Until we were part of the care system, we didn’t realize how broken it was,” Seth says in a video they recorded on behalf of the organization Caring Across Generations, to raise alarms about the threat families face under a pair of proposals to slash health care programs for the poor and disabled that are being considered at the state and federal level, and encourage people to contact their legislators. He adds, “Millions of low income families, families of people with disabilities, families that have older adults in them, are facing this struggle every day right now. And that is why it is so unfathomable that federal and state legislatures are making massive cuts to Medicaid as we speak.”
“We are cutting crucial services for people who are aging and disabled,” he explains. “That means these people will be losing access or have less access to the health care they need, creating more out-of-pocket expenses and medical debt.”
In Washington, President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which was recently approved by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, would cut roughly $600 billion from Medicaid in order to help pay for a new round of tax cuts for the wealthy.
The Trump tax bill is projected to kick over 10 million people off Medicaid, the government health insurance program for low-income and disabled Americans. The legislation would also limit so-called provider taxes, which states use to provide supplemental payments to hospitals, doctors, and other health care providers to help pay the costs of treating Medicaid patients. The bill would additionally impose a financial penalty on states, like California, that offer health coverage to undocumented immigrants.
In California, the situation could be compounded by further cuts proposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom that would slash Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program.
Roughly one quarter of the 5 million Americans with dementia rely on Medicaid, the country’s largest payer of long-term care. Medicaid is a pillar for caregivers — some 12 percent of recipients are people who can’t work because of their responsibilities caring for a family member. Their ability to access the program could be jeopardized by the Big Beautiful Bill, which would impose work requirements on all able-bodied adults under 65 in order to qualify for Medicaid.
“Almost everyone in this country knows or loves someone that relies on Medicaid, even if they don’t rely on Medicaid themselves. And we have the power together,” Lauren says in the video.
“We need to reject any cuts or changes that would take more care away from families that need and deserve it,” Seth adds. “At the state level and the federal level.”
