Childern’s health care needs to be protected in any rollback of Medicaid coverage contemplated by Republicans who campaigned on repealing and replacing former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

Obamacare dramatically changed the nation’s health care landscape. When Medicaid was launched in 1965, the government assistance program was limited to low-income families with children or to patients with serious disabilities. Obamacare changed all that by extending Medicaid to families without children for the first time. And income eligibility was raised to recruit millions of more families into the program.

For more than half a century Medicaid covered eligible children in pretty much the same manner whether before and after Obamacare, according to Greg Raymond, Southern Colorado regional vice president for Children’s Hospital.

Yet the current version of the American Health Care Act passed by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives would cut Obamacare’s Medicaid growth across the board, children and adults alike.

Read more at The Pueblo Chieftain.