The chair of the McHenry County College board will be a guest of U.S. Rep. Bill Foster at President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday.
Foster, a Naperville Democrat, announced Monday that Suzanne Hoban of Woodstock, who is also the founder and executive director of the Family Health Partnership Clinic in Crystal Lake, will be his guest for the address.
Hoban’s clinic was founded in 1996 and provides medical services to uninsured people in McHenry County. It will have a 30th anniversary celebration March 12.
Foster said Trump and Republicans in Congress enacted what he said were “the largest cuts to health care in American history, sending costs skyrocketing and increasing the number of uninsured people in Illinois by an estimated 528,000 by 2034.” Foster cited an article from the Center for American Progress for the statistic.
Millions of people could reportedly lose their health insurance over the next decade as a result of actions in Washington, D.C.
Foster said: “In the face of these cuts, the Family Health Partnership Clinic’s work is more important than ever. We must lift up leaders like Suzanne who ensure our communities have access to the affordable, high-quality health care they deserve when Washington falls short.”
Hoban said in the release she was “honored” to join Foster.
She added: “At the Family Health Partnership Clinic, our mission is rooted in the belief that we have a responsibility to care for one another. Recent cuts to health care have already had a devastating impact on our community, and we will continue working every day to provide our uninsured neighbors with the health services they need. Congressman Foster has been a strong advocate for expanding affordable care, and I look forward to joining him to highlight the urgent need for lower costs and better access to care for families nationwide.”
“We had hoped that we would have solved the issue of health care access by this point,” Hoban said at the time.
Supporters of the federal health care changes have argued they will make Medicaid more sustainable, accountable and will remove able-bodied people who can work from eligibility.