At the state, well, while bipartisanship is often the goal, and perhaps should be, the natural path of things is to divide into camps. And when one camp has absolute power, the results can quickly move from surprising to outright terrifying.

I have much to say on this and will be sharing experiences on it in a future note to you. I have promised you that I would give you practical steps you can do every day to flip WA. But I’m going to deviate on that promise ever so slightly today.

Instead of telling you what you can do, I’m going to share with you a devastating example of WHY we need to restore balance in WA state. It’s a deeply personal story, and I understand if you can’t read it or if it becomes too hard to read.

But if you’re on this journey with me, I feel like I need to tell you WHY I’m so fired up to flip WA.

~Josh

The Article below was originally published here.

This is not an exaggerated story. I did not make it up. It is not a crazy theory. It is the absolute truth. It is happening right now in Washington state.

The people who run our state government make choices. These choices cause disabled people to suffer in terrible pain. If we do not stop these leaders, their choices will cause people to die.

I know this sounds extreme. You might think our government would never be so cold. You might think our leaders would never be so heartless. But they are. I have the proof. I have the receipts right here in the new state budget.

I am Representative Josh Penner. I am a lawmaker. But first, I am a father. My son is profoundly autistic. He has severe developmental disabilities. Because of him, I know exactly what it is like to hit a brick wall when trying to get basic medical care.

Every parent of a child with severe disabilities knows this wall. We hit this wall every single day. We fight the system just to get our kids through the day. We fight for schools. We fight for doctors. We fight for basic respect from a world that does not understand our kids.

But when it comes to dental care, the wall is not just hard. It is a living nightmare.

Think about the last time you took your kids to the dentist. It is usually easy. You make an appointment. You drive to the office. Your child sits in the chair. They open their mouth. The dentist cleans their teeth. They get a sticker and a new toothbrush. Then you go home.

When my son needs to go to the doctor, we have to plan for days. We have to prepare him. We have to make sure he is calm. Even then, things can go wrong. A child with profound autism might hate the feeling of a toothbrush. They might hate the taste of toothpaste. They might refuse to open their mouth.

Parents of disabled kids try so hard. We really do. We buy special brushes. We sing songs. We try every trick in the book just to keep their teeth clean. But sometimes, our best effort is not enough. Sometimes, the medications they take for seizures or behaviors ruin their teeth. The medicine dries out their mouth. The teeth start to rot. It is not the parents' fault. It is not the child's fault. It is just a sad fact of life with severe disabilities.

When the teeth rot, the pain starts. And the pain does not stop.

I want you to close your eyes. I want you to imagine your own child.

Imagine they have a terrible toothache. A tooth is rotting in their mouth. Their jaw is swollen. It is the size of a baseball. It is red and hot. They cannot eat. They cannot drink water. They have not slept a wink in three days.

Now imagine that your child cannot speak. Because of their severe disability, they cannot point to their mouth. They cannot say where it hurts. They do not understand what a tooth is. They do not understand why their head is throbbing with the worst pain they have ever felt. They do not understand why the pain will not stop.

So, what do they do? They scream. They cry. They hit themselves in the face to try and make the pain go away. They writhe in agony on the floor. They bang their heads against the wall. They bite their own hands to distract from the pain.

They do this every single hour. They do this every single day.

As a parent, you just have to watch. You hold them. You cry with them. You feel totally helpless. Your heart breaks into a million pieces. You would do anything to take the pain away. You would gladly take the pain yourself if it meant your child could just sleep for one night.

Dental pain is not just a small problem. A bad tooth is not just about having a nice smile. An infected tooth is a ticking time bomb inside a person's head.

A rotting tooth is like a poison factory inside the body. The infection grows. It builds up pus in the gums. It breeds deadly bacteria. If a doctor does not fix it, that bacteria does not just stay in the mouth. It leaks straight into the blood.

Once it is in the blood, it travels fast. It can go to the brain and cause a brain abscess. It can go to the heart and cause a deadly heart infection. It can cause sepsis. Sepsis makes the whole body shut down.

For people with severe disabilities who cannot speak up, a bad tooth can grow into a killer. People can die from a toothache. In the year 2026, in the state of Washington, people can die from a toothache.

You do what any desperate parent would do. You try to find a doctor.

You call a private dentist in your town. They tell you no. You call another one in the next town. They say no. You call ten clinics. Then twenty clinics. Then fifty clinics across the state.

You beg them. You plead with them. You tell them your child is in agony. You tell them you need help right now. Every single one of them locks the door and says no.

Why does this happen? It is not because dentists are bad people. Most dentists want to help. They went to school to help people. But the math of our broken state system makes it impossible for them to say yes.

A child or adult with severe developmental disabilities cannot just sit in a normal dentist chair. They cannot just open their mouth and hold still. The bright lights in their eyes terrify them. The sharp metal tools terrify them. The high-pitched whining noises of the drills terrify them. It hurts their senses.

They will fight. They will thrash around. It is dangerous for the patient, and it is dangerous for the dentist. One wrong move with a drill could cause a serious injury.

To safely pull a rotting tooth from a severely disabled person, you need special tools. You need a sensory-friendly room. It must be quiet and calm. It cannot have scary lights and sounds. You need a lot of extra time. A visit that takes twenty minutes for you might take three hours for someone with severe autism.

Most importantly, you need a special doctor called an anesthesiologist. This doctor must give the patient medicine to put them to sleep. They must do this safely. They must watch the patient's heart and breathing. Then the dentist can do the work without causing trauma or injury.

Private dentists do not have these quiet rooms. They do not have these special doctors on staff. Setting up a room like this costs a lot of money. Hiring a sleep doctor costs a lot of money.

The state uses a health insurance program for the poor and disabled. It is called Medicaid. But the state pays private dentists absolute pennies on the dollar. The state does not pay enough to cover the cost of the sleep doctor. It does not even cover the cost of turning on the lights in the clinic.

Private dentists simply cannot afford to take these patients. If they took these cases, they would lose money on every single visit. They would go bankrupt. They would have to close their businesses.

When parents cannot find a dentist, they panic. They have only one place left to go. They put their screaming child in the car and drive to the hospital emergency room.

You sit in the waiting room for hours. People stare at you. They stare at your child who is crying and hitting themselves. You feel so alone.

Finally, a doctor sees you. The doctor is very nice. But the doctor is not a dentist. The doctor does not have the tools to pull a tooth. The hospital emergency room is not set up for dental surgery on a thrashing, terrified patient.

The doctor says they cannot fix the tooth. The doctor can only give you medicine.

The doctor gives your child strong painkillers. The doctor gives them antibiotics to fight the poison in their gums. Then the hospital sends you home.

The medicine helps for a few days. The swelling goes down. The crying stops. You finally get some sleep.

But the bad tooth is still there. The poison factory is still inside their mouth. A few weeks later, the medicine wears off. The bacteria comes back. The swelling comes back. The screaming comes back.

You are right back where you started. You go back to the hospital. You sit in the waiting room again. You get more pills. You go home. It is an endless cycle. It is a nightmare that never ends.

The doors stay locked. Your child stays in agony. The state leaves you alone in the dark. You just watch your child suffer.

I saw this pain. I lived it. I talked to dozens of families who are living it right now. I knew we had to fix it.

The most shocking part is that the state already has the tools to fix it today. We do not have to invent anything new. We do not have to build anything new. We do not have to raise taxes.

Right now, the state of Washington owns and runs special places. The state calls them Residential Habilitation Centers. We call them RHCs for short. These RHCs are homes for people with severe disabilities. They are safe places where people get around-the-clock care.

Inside these RHCs, the state built fully equipped, specialized dental clinics. These state-run clinics have everything. They have the right chairs. They have the right dentists who know exactly how to talk to disabled patients. They have the sleep doctors to safely put patients to sleep. They have the training to handle complex, severe cases. They are peaceful. They are safe. They are ready to go.

Right now, there are empty chairs in those clinics.

I went to work. I am an elected lawmaker. It is my job to fix broken things. I wrote a simple, common-sense rule to put into the state budget. The budget is Senate Bill 5998. My rule was that the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services should within existing funding explore and report back to lawmakers this fall the feasibility of using these resources to support this exact need in the community.

Let's make that absolutely clear. My amendment, which passed out of both the House and Senate said we should have a report back to the legislature this winter describing what it would take to implement a pilot program.

It said we should evaluate what it would take to bring the disabled people I've just described, into an RHC to use the empty chairs if there was ANY unused capacity.

It told the state to merely describe, as a concept, what it would take to open the doors of the clinics we already own. The clinics we already pay for. It told the state to notionally describe the feasibility of getting these people out of pain!

My plan meant state workers would just do the planning as part of their normal, everyday jobs. It did not ask for a single new dime of your tax money. It did not ask to build new buildings. It did not ask to buy new tools. It just said we should use what we already have to stop human beings from suffering.

Lawmakers from both the Republican party and the Democratic party looked at this policy. They agreed. They voted for it. They passed it. We put it into the budget.

There was hope. A glimmer of hope at least.

Then, the governor killed it.

With a stroke of his pen, he crossed it out. He vetoed a free study that could save lives.

Why would he do this? Why would any leader say no to a free plan to pull rotting teeth out of the mouths of disabled children?

Why would a governor look at families crying for help and slam the door in their faces?

The answer will make you sick to your stomach. He did it because of special interest groups.

In Olympia, certain powerful lobbies hate the RHCs.

You did not elect these groups. They do not answer to the voters. They don't speak for every family of every disabled person, though they would have you believe they do. You cannot fire them. They have extreme power.

In the halls of the state capitol, they have more power than the families who are suffering. They have more power than the lawmakers you elect.

These lobbies follow a strict, stubborn political idea. They believe that everyone with a disability must live out in the "community."

They believe that state-run RHCs are bad, no matter what. They hate the buildings. They hate the concept. They call them "institutions" like it is a dirty word. They want to close every single RHC in the state.

They do not care if an RHC has the only dental chair in the county that can help your child. They would rather see that chair destroyed.

These groups have meetings with politicians. They receive substantial state funding, and yes, they sit at the nexus of critical money trails.

They write reports. They use fancy words. But they do not sit up at two in the morning holding a child who is hitting their own face to stop a toothache.

They do not watch a teenager cry because their mouth is full of infection.

They do not know the exhaustion of calling fifty clinics and hearing the word no fifty times. They only care about their perfect political picture.

RHC's are not the perfect political picture. They are anathema to them and they will burn them down even if it means the harm and death of the disabled adults who rely on them - as there is literally no other system of care available.

These lobbies believe that letting a disabled person get a tooth pulled inside an RHC violates their vision of "community inclusion."

The Governor appears to agree that using a state clinic is not "pure" enough to warrant evaluation. They and he would rather see a disabled person scream in pain at home than get treatment inside a state-run building that has the wrong three letters associated with it (R & H & C).

The governor wrote his excuse in his veto message. He wrote that the state expects to close two of the four residential habilitation centers once the census reaches a certain threshold. He said this plan was only a temporary solution. He used that as his reason to veto the study.

Think about how crazy that is. Think about how cold that is. If you have a rotting tooth today, and a doctor offers to pull it out today, do you say no because the clinic might close in five years?

Of course not! You take the help! You stop the pain!

The governor told these families they must keep suffering. He told them they must keep suffering because his political allies do not like the building where the dentist works.

He threw away a real lifeline to protect his political ideas. He slammed the door on families in crisis to make unelected lobbyists happy. He chose to keep his political ideas pure instead of keeping citizens safe.

The governor did not stop there. In his veto message, he gave a new order. He told the Department of Social and Health Services and the Health Care Authority to develop a plan to expand access to dental services in the community.

He told the state agencies to go make a "plan" to get private community dentists to do the work instead.

This is a cruel joke.

It is pure gaslighting. It makes me so angry I can hardly see straight.

We already know private dentists cannot do the work. We just went over this!

Private dentists do not have the special rooms. They do not have the sleep doctors. The state refuses to pay them enough money to do it.

We tried the private community dentists for years, and the system failed. I wrote the amendment because the system failed!

If the governor really wanted private dentists to help, he would pay them more. He would give them the money to build sensory rooms. He would give them the money to hire sleep doctors.

He is doing the exact opposite. In this very same budget, the Democrat state majority and the Governor actually CUT Medicaid pay.

Look at Section 214, subsection (79), on page 265. It says that effective January 1, 2026, the authority shall reduce Medicaid managed care rates by one percent.

Read that again. It is right there in the law. The governor says we must use private dentists. In the same breath, he and the Democrat majority cut the money that pays those private dentists for this sort of care.

When you cut Medicaid rates for clinics that already lose money serving the disabled, they stop taking Medicaid entirely. They close their doors to the disabled.

How can the state demand that private doctors take on complex, expensive, difficult cases while cutting their pay at the exact same time? It is a fantasy. It is a lie told to the public to make the governor look good while he does absolutely nothing to help.

The policy designed to give disabled people "community inclusion" actually guarantees doctors will entirely exclude them from getting healthcare.

They are "included" in the community only to suffer in silence.

This is the disgusting end game of this anti-RHC, community only perspective. There IS NO community care. It simply doesn't exist. It cannot exist. The system is broken, utterly, entirely - and will always be broken with these people at the helm. They broke it and they refuse to even acknowledge it.

The state claims it cannot use its own dental clinics to stop human suffering. The state claims it must be careful with its resources. The state says we just do not have the money or the ability right now.

Let us look at what the state IS spending your tax money on.

Let us look at the exact same budget bill, Senate Bill 5998. The state spends billions and billions of dollars.

I am going scorched earth on this broken system. Here are the receipts. Here is what the governor and the state think is more important than a disabled child’s rotting teeth.

I want you to read this list carefully. I want you to see exactly where your money goes.

Read that list again. Let the absolute horror of that list sink into your mind.

The state of Washington has BILLIONS (80 Billion in fact) of dollars to spend on every pet project you can think of. The state has money for environmental studies. The state has money for bureaucratic work groups. The state has money for bugs and fish and crabs and wolves. The state has money for endless stacks of paper and reports that no one will ever read.

But when the legislature did the bare minimum for disabled people suffering dental emergencies, requiring DSHS within the budget amounts appropriated to tell us in concept HOW they would utilize unused chair time at and RHC to pull a rotting tooth out of a human being's skull, the governor said no.

He vetoed it.

This is not just bad math. This is a deep, sickening moral rot. It is an egregious, callous, and heartless way to run a government.

It makes me sick. It should make you sick, too.

The people who make these decisions lost their minds. They lost their humanity.

They surround themselves with lobbyists and charts and graphs. They sit far away from the screams of a child with an infected jaw. They talk about inclusion and equity and community. Those are just buzzwords.

They are empty words used to hide the cruelty of their actions. They use these words to sound kind while they do unspeakably damaging things.

We must do better in Olympia. We can do better than sending the same people back who have broken WA.

Here's what true inclusion means.

True inclusion means we help a disabled person when they are hurting. It means we use every single tool we have to stop their pain. It means we do not let them suffer just because a lobbyist does not like the building where the doctor works.

True equity means a disabled child gets the same chance to live without pain as anyone else.

If you are a parent, put yourself in our shoes.

What would you do if your child cried in pain day after day? What if their face swelled up and they could not eat? What if you knew a clinic with empty chairs and trained doctors sat just down the road? What if the state locked the door to that clinic and told you to go away?

You would be furious. You would be broken. You would demand answers.

Families are breaking right now. They beg for a lifeline. They do everything they can just to survive another day. They fight just to get their kids to sleep through the night without screaming.

The state ignores them to play political games. The governor literally lets people suffer to protect the feelings of special interest groups. He trades human lives for political points.

We are supposed to be a civilized society. A civilized society takes care of its weakest members. Right now, the state of Washington fails that test. We fail miserably.

We can fix it. We have immense resources. We have the doctors with no patients. We have the chairs. We only need the courage to open the doors.

We need to tell the special interest groups to get out of the way. We need to tell the governor to stop playing politics with human pain.

We cannot keep pretending that this system works. We cannot keep passing budgets that fund the bureaucracy's endless wish list while leaving our most vulnerable neighbors to suffer in the dark.

We cannot let special interests and the circular economy of Olympia keep run our state while children scream in pain.

Every single dollar we spend on equity reports and honey bees while humans sit in agony is a dollar covered in shame.

Every time a politician talks about equity while cutting Medicaid rates for disabled patients, it is a slap in the face to families who are drowning. It is a total betrayal of the public trust.

The government's first job is to protect its most vulnerable people.

By killing this common-sense, zero-cost dental program, the governor failed that job. He failed our children. He failed our families.

Again he chose special interests over lives. He chose politics over pain relief.

He chose ideology over basic human decency.

That is a horror we should never, ever accept.

I am Representative Josh Penner. I will keep fighting for my children.

I will keep fighting for your children.

I will keep fighting for every single disabled person in this state who deserves to live a life free of agony. I need you to see the truth. I need you to look at the receipts. I need you to stand up, raise your voice, and say: Enough is enough.