A wheelchair ride across Wisconsin calls attention to Medicaid cuts

After a 125-mile trip on his powered wheelchair, Carl Schulze rolled up just before noon Thursday to the Wisconsin Capitol.

The resident of Fox Crossing, near Neenah, made the journey to make a point: How Medicaid has helped him and thousands of other Wisconsin residents with disabilities — and how that help is being threatened in Washington, D.C.

A fall from a porch 19 years ago broke Schulze’s neck. He survived, but the accident left him unable to use his arms or legs.

Medicaid coverage for home care makes it possible for Schulze to hire aides who help him with virtually every activity of daily living. But with cuts to Medicaid totaling more than $900 million in 10 years because of the tax cut and spending law that President Donald Trump signed in July 2025, he worries that it may be harder to maintain his coverage, or pay the healthcare workers who support him.

And another initiative from the administration has angered — and worried — Schulze as well.

Since 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Olmstead ruling has been interpreted to say that people with disabilities have a fundamental right to get their care at home or in the community instead of having to live in a nursing home or other institution. In June, however, the Trump administration U.S. Department of Justice issued a legal memo rejecting that long-held assumption.

“Apparently, it’s not a violation of my civil rights to put me in an institution against my will,” Schulze said to a bank of TV microphones on the sidewalk in front of the state Capitol. “The federal government is openly telling states, there will be no consequences if they defund the very services that keep disabled people living at home. They have effectively given states a green light to warehouse us again.”

The looming Medicaid cuts could give states, which administer the health insurance program and cover some of its costs, “no choice but to cut programs,” Schulze said. “And when they decide on what’s cut, the programs that serve people with disabilities will be first up on the chopping block. That means people like me may soon be forced to choose between our physical health and even the rest of our life in the future.”

Other federal initiatives are cutting federal grants that “no longer align with the administration’s priorities,” Schulze said. “For Wisconsin, this means even more uncertainty and deeper potential cuts to independent living support.”

Schulze didn’t take his wheelchair ride alone. Starting in mid-July, he began the trip from his apartment in Fox Crossing, driving the chair until the battery needed charging, with drivers accompanying him in his van. With each successive day, they drove him and the chair to the point where he stopped previously and continued the trip. Along the way he recorded videos for social media.

Care in the community is first and foremost a human right, said Jenny Price, executive director of the Wisconsin Board for People with Developmental Disabilities, in an interview. But it’s also more economical than putting someone in an institution, she observed.

“When you look at these [home care] services on their own, they appear very expensive,” Price said. “What kind of gets lost when people look at that big dollar amount is what that dollar amount could be if it were provided in an institutional setting.”

The cuts’ impact doesn’t end with people who require Medicaid for their healthcare.

Jason Glozier, the co-chair of the Survival Coalition of Wisconsin Disability Organizations, is the executive director of the Wisconsin Coalition of Independent Living Centers, a network of agencies around the state that offer information resources, navigation assistance and advocacy for people with disabilities who want to remain in the community.

“Almost 50% of unpaid caregivers are providing as much or more care hours than a half-time job,” Glozier said, citing a survey that the Survival Coalition conducted last year. “And 31% of caregivers are providing care more than 60 hours per week. Under any sort of labor laws, that wouldn’t be fair treatment. It shouldn’t be fair to expect our families to provide that care unpaid.”

“Family members have been providing enormous amounts of uncompensated care, for decades in some cases, to keep people in their home,” Tami Jackson, a policy analyst for the Board for People with Developmental Disabilities and  the other Survival Coalition co-chair, told reporters. “Even small cuts to the number of hours [of healthcare coverage] that somebody like Carl and many others get can mean the difference between being in their home and being locked away in a nursing facility where you don’t have the freedom to decide what your hours are, when you eat, who you can see, whether or not you can commute to a job, and a thousand other daily things that most of us are not thinking about right now.”