Medicaid becoming merely a means tested certification
Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured (KCMU)
News release on Medicaid reductions
September 22, 2003
In the Past Three Years, Two-thirds of States Have Reduced Eligibility and
Restricted Health Care Benefits for Families and Low-Income Seniors-Not Just
Curbing Payments
With most states coping with their fourth year of fiscal stress, all 50 states and the District of Columbia (DC) have planned or implemented Medicaid cost containment actions for fiscal year (FY) 2004.
Diane Rowland, executive director of KCMU:"The duration of the state fiscal crisis is impacting Medicaid coverage broadly and deeply-and it's not just actions curbing provider payments or controlling prescription drug costs that we have heard about consistently.
When 34 states have reduced eligibility and even more have restricted needed
health care benefits in at least one of the last three years and there is little short-term hope of states recovering their revenue losses, we have to be concerned about low-income seniors and families getting less health care or losing it altogether."
http://www.kff.org/content/2003/20030922/prls922.pdf
Comment: As long as Medicaid remains a welfare program for very low income individuals, it will always be used as tool to balance budgets in difficult economic times, even though it is a chronically underfunded program.
Having a Medicaid card alone does not ensure access to adequate health care.
Medicaid is becoming less and less a form of insurance, and more and
more a certification process declaring the individual has been subjected to
means testing and is incapable of paying for medical care. Providers are now
in a position of either accepting losses because of their belief that everyone
should have medical care, or refusing to provide care because the insurer
(state and federal government) has failed to adequately fund the actual costs of care.
If we had an egalitarian system of social insurance, the political will
would be there to ensure that the system would be adequately funded for all
of us. Wouldn't that be better?