While Medicaid is best known as a health care program for poor people, more than 80 percent of its budget goes to care for elderly people, disabled people and children.
Nancy and Dan Gapinski of Glendale, Wis., remember a time when they couldn't really communicate with their own son.
"He used to not really have any kinds of conversations with us. He did a lot of echoing things that we said, and scripting from movies," Nancy Gapinski says as she and her husband wait for their son Ben's school bus to arrive. "A lot of times kids didn't know how to respond to him then, and didn't know what he was trying to say and conversations wouldn't really go anywhere."
But that's all changed. On a recent Friday afternoon, 10-year-old Ben hops off the bus, greets both his parents and starts chatting about his day.
