Yesterday’s Quote of the Day (“Government supports rotten teeth for patients in poverty”) discussed the Medicaid waivers obtained by Indiana Governor Mike Pence. Today’s post continues on that topic.
The Goal Was Simplicity; Instead, There’s a Many-Headed Medicaid
By Margot Sanger-Katz
The New York Times, January 28, 2015
Indiana has become the latest Republican-led state to expand its Medicaid program as part of the Affordable Care Act. As has become the pattern, it was done with a series of waivers from particular federal requirements.
When the state’s governor, Mike Pence, announced the news on Tuesday, the focus of his speech was less about his state’s decision to embrace this part of Obamacare than about the special concessions he’d been able to extract from the Obama administration.
Newly eligible Medicaid recipients will have to pay monthly premiums or be locked out of certain services, he announced, and higher-earning beneficiaries who fail to pay will be shut out of the program for six months. People who use the emergency room frequently will need to pay higher co-payments than the federal government has ever allowed.
The provisions, designed to encourage residents to take more responsibility for the costs of their health care, break new ground in what the Obama administration will allow in exchange for expansion.
NYT Readers’ Comments:
By Bob Solomon, MD
Edmonton, Canada
You live in “Cloud-Cuckoo Land” in the fantasy you have the best medical care system on earth. Baloney. Check it out.
Canada is right next door. Come see how a sane federal health plan works, covering all and ensuring that (1) we live longer, (2) we have fewer chronic ills, (3) we have lower cost drugs, (4) we have lower cost hospitals, (5) we have lower cost operations, (6) we have lower accounting costs for all parties, and (7) we have no medical bankruptcies and impoverishment anywhere, for any income, for the unemployed, for the elderly. Long waits for ER? I waited 4 minutes for an asthma attack to be dealt with, 2.4 hours for a minor ear problem — wax. In Philly, I waited 2.4 for a back injury. Twice. So no difference.
We get free (tax-paid) care in Alberta. No out of pocket, no minimum, no exclusions, no co-pays, no nothin’.
Premiums exist in certain provinces: $35 a month per person or about that, and some people purchase extended coverage. I also pay approx. $1200 a year for added features: free or nearly free drugs, and a large subsidy for glasses, hearing aids, private rooms, canes, and things like that.
Americans live in a “exceptional” med world — a medical services madhouse. It was not created by ACA, of course. And because of the med and drug and hospital corporations, I mean “people”, and the know-little-or-nothing GOP, it was ensured to endure after ACA. Medical madness is still a disease you need to cure.
And…
By Don McCanne, MD
Denying poor people dental care simply because they cannot pay the premium, as Pence’s program does, defies logic. Does sentencing poor people to rotten teeth truly motivate them to find money that they don’t have in order to provide them with the “dignity to pay for their own health insurance”?
Does Pence propose that we change the rhetoric from “skin in the game” to “rotten teeth in the mouth”?