Before anyone freaks out, Kate is doing great. But something happened this week that I want to share regarding Kate’s ongoing support in the current political climate. Please be warned that I was really mad, as mad or more mad than I was during Kate’s hospital time. It is a really raw post. I won’t blame you if you don’t read this. If you do, thanks. Feel free to share.
I posted a version of this on Medium and shared on Facebook and X. What is below is a longer version, an earlier draft not designed for skimming and SEO. When I finished this draft and read it, I cried.
*I Will Not Be Silenced*
A Mother’s Statement on the Night Before the No Kings Rally
My name is Audrey. I have a PhD from the University of Minnesota Medical School. I am a mother, a caregiver, and a fighter. I have been fighting for my children’s lives since before they were born.
I will not be silenced.
Two days ago, a nurse arrived at my home in scrubs to conduct a reassessment of my two children’s medical needs. My daughter “Kat” is seven years old. She was diagnosed with congenital heart disease at her 20-week ultrasound – still in my womb. She had her first open-heart surgery at 3.5 weeks old. Three open-heart surgeries in two and a half weeks. Thirteen times under anesthesia – eleven of them before she turned two. Five hospitalizations, the longest lasting five months. Seven months total in the hospital before she was 22 months old. A heart transplant at 20 months. She is also autistic, has ADHD, and suffers from anxiety. She is fed three times a day through a G-tube in her stomach.
At age two, Kat could not move independently. She could not crawl. She could not stand to walk. At age three and a half, she was non-verbal. Today, Kat can run and play. Today, Kat is a motor-mouth who really loves to talk. Early intervention – state-funded services – made all the difference.
My daughter “Cathy” is nearly four. She is autistic. She had such crippling anxiety that most people assumed she was non-verbal because that is how she presented herself outside our home. She would curl into a ball in public. She would not speak to anyone outside the family. Today, after receiving occupational therapy through state services, Cathy talks to people outside the family. She is making progress. Early intervention made all the difference.
I am deeply, profoundly grateful to the state of Minnesota. These programs – these resources – changed my children’s lives.
So you can imagine how I felt when I was told, during that reassessment, that I was not allowed to speak.
I am a paid parent under Minnesota’s CFSS program – Community First Services and Supports. I am paid $20 an hour to care for my own medically complex children. My husband Dave is the “Responsible Party” – the one whose name is on the paperwork. He works full-time. He is a wonderful father and a wonderful partner, and he was there, doing his best. But he is not the one who gets the call from school when Kat hits another child because she’s overwhelmed. He is not the one who sits with Cathy through a 45-minute tantrum before preschool. He is not the one trying to keep two non-swimmers safe at the beloved pool. He is not the one who changes the G-tube button, manages the tacrolimus dose, coordinates the cardiology appointments. That is me.
And I was told I was not allowed to speak.
I sat in my own home, in silence, while my husband – doing his very best – gave incomplete answers about our children’s medical needs. I felt like I was living in Gilead. I felt like the handmaid in Washington, D.C. – the one whose mouth was physically closed. Only the male was allowed to speak. The woman had no rights, no voice, no standing in a room about her own children.
That is not the Minnesota I know. That is not the country I believe in.
When I escalated to Dakota County, I was told the same thing: state regulations, fraud prevention, strict rules.
I understand fraud is real. In December 2025, prosecutors announced that up to $9 billion – more than half of $18 billion billed across 14 Minnesota Medicaid programs since 2018 – may have been fraudulent. That is staggering, and the perpetrators deserve full accountability.
But here is what the investigation actually found: the fraud was committed almost entirely by fake companies – shell entities created for the sole purpose of billing Medicaid for services they never provided. Fraudsters traveled from Philadelphia to Minnesota to set up fake businesses. One company alone fraudulently billed $7.2 million. Another sent over $200,000 to Kenya. These are not paid parents. These are not mothers like me.
I am paid $20 an hour. And before that $20 reaches me, it passes through the county and two separate private companies. The administrative infrastructure alone consumes a significant share of every dollar Minnesota invests – $550 million in the CFSS program in fiscal years 2026-27 alone. I am not the problem. The shell companies were the problem. The bureaucratic overhead is the problem.
But in the wake of the fraud crackdown, it is the mothers who are being silenced.
When I sat in the waiting room at Cathy’s occupational therapy clinic this week, I spoke with other parents – all of them paid parents, all of them who had gone through reassessments. Not one of them had experienced what I experienced. They were all allowed to speak. My experience is a direct result of an overcorrection: front-line assessors, spooked by the fraud investigations, are now silencing paid parent caregivers entirely.
Meanwhile, this country is spending $2 billion a day on a war with Iran – $16.5 billion in the first 12 days of Operation Epic Fury. The Trump administration has asked Congress for a $200 billion supplemental defense budget, on top of the $839 billion defense bill already passed for fiscal year 2026. Total military spending this year may exceed $1 trillion.
One trillion dollars.
And we are here debating whether a mother with a PhD – who has spent seven years fighting to keep her daughter’s transplanted heart beating – is allowed to speak in her own home during a 70-minute assessment.
This is the Trump administration’s America: $2 billion a day for bombs, and $20 an hour is too much to pay the mothers of disabled children. The weak. The disabled. The ones who don’t have lobbyists. The ones who can’t fight back.
I can fight back. I am fighting back.
Tomorrow I will be at the No Kings rally. I will be there because this is bigger than one reassessment. This is about a pattern – a deliberate, systematic dismantling of the programs and protections that make it possible for families like mine to survive.
My daughter Kat almost died multiple times before she was two years old. She did, once – for seven minutes on the operating table. The state of Minnesota gave her a chance at life. State funded programs gave her a future. These are not handouts. These are investments in human beings.
Don’t take them away.
I will not be silenced. Not for my daughters. Not for the mothers sitting in those waiting rooms across Minnesota. Not for the families this administration has decided don’t matter.
We are here. We are not going away. No kings.
– Audrey, March 27, 2026