medicaid

Sen. Richard Burr last week co-sponsored a bill to overhaul the Medicaid program, overturn the federal health care plan and give states new flexibility to design their own health insurance program for the poor. [snip]
The Medicaid Improvement and State Empowerment Act would repeal the national health care law passed last year by Congress with the backing of President Barack Obama. It would provide money to the states to run their own programs.

Ah yes. Nothing like the smell of chickenshit in the morning. Burr doesn't have the backbone to take a principled stand on anything. If he's against entitlement programs and all in favor of states having more freedom, why not just cut states off completely?

This post brought to you via Under the Dome at the Charlotte Observer.

They tell us we’re dropping about $10 billion a month in Afghanistan so we can catch that Bin Laden guy...but eventually, we’re gonna catch him, and as soon as we do you can imagine that folks will be wondering why we’re still over there – and I gotta tell ya, I’m one of those people.

I mean, we’re over here talking about how we're so broke that we have no choice but to cut a couple of billion from heat assistance for the poor, and a billion-and-a-half from the Social Security operations budget, and money from food stamps and childcare assistance and tornado forecasting in Alabama…but every single month, just as regular as clockwork, we seem to be able to find another $10 billion to spend in Afghanistan, even as we have an economy that could badly use another round of truly productive stimulus.

And I don’t think y’all even realize just how much money $10 billion really is – but today we’re gonna see if we can’t fix that with a bit of a thought exercise.

Imagine if we set up a program that took that Afghanistan money and spent it right here at home for a year or two – and it was spent in the form of a lottery, where we stimulate the larger economy, help fix the mortgage crisis, and create a more energy-independent nation, all at the same time.

I got all we need except a catchy name; with that in mind let’s move on to the description of how the Happy Super Fun Day Peace Lotto Stimulus Thingy works.

Oh, my, has there been a lot of news since we spoke last about the Potential Impending Death Of Medicare: obviously we’re going to have to talk about the implications of Osama Bin Laden’s death (but we’ll do that another day), President Obama very publicly congratulated Donald Trump for having the leadership skills to know that Gary Busey was the one who needed to be fired after the way he ran the men’s cooking team on “The Apprentice”, and, of course, there was that “extreme ironing incident” on the M1 near London’s Mill Hill.

But what you may not have noticed is that in the past two weeks the Grim Weeper himself, Speaker of the House John Boehner, has gone from saying “I fully support Paul Ryan’s budget, including on Medicare” to saying that the Paul Ryan “Let’s Kill Medicare” plan is “an idea … worthy of consideration”—and when that happens that quickly you know somebody applied what we might politely describe as being at least “an equal and opposite force”.

And what I’m here to suggest today is that the opposite force in question…is you.

Dear Parents,and fellow NC Blue bloggers...

I have a special needs son, Johnathan that is on Medicaid and the Innovation Waiver (CAP), He has daily seizures, and is severely delayed. His seizure medicine is over seventeen hundred dollars a month, plus he has numerous doctor and hospital visits. Johnathan’s yearly medical expenses has sometimes been over fifty thousand dollars a year.
My husband, and Johnathan father just passed away in August 2009. He worked hard all his life and always paid into Social Security, Medicare benefits plus state and federal taxes.
When he passed, Johnathan then was then entitled to his Social Security benefits. Which he has started to receive in September of 2009.

Have you ever noticed how the Health Care Safety Nets such as "Free" Clinics, Medicaid, Medicare, and other such programs are touted as a "Safety Net" to "Prevent people from going without health care" and to "assist citizens in local communities"? I have seen these programs touted by government officials and some government employees as a safety catch-all that will supposedly help everyone. They receive commendations for their innovation and serving the citizens that can't afford to pay for health care. They are great things, really, they provide a service to SOME of the citizenry and they fulfill a need for a portion of the population. So I am not really speaking ill of them because they are a good thing. My beef is with those who tout them as a complete "safety net" without understanding that they only serve a small portion of a population.

I was listening to WUNC this morning, and they said something that shocked me. Apparently over 20% of North Carolinians do not have any health insurance right now, due to either their job not providing it and not having money to pay for it themselves or because they are unemployed. That combined with over 30% of North Carolinians who are on Medicaid or Medicare means that over 50% of North Carolinians are either on government programs or have no health insurance at all.

This combined with the Paul Krugman piece in the New York Times about the real need for Obama to push health care shows that health insurance really is one of the most critical problems right now. Programs like SCHIPS and Medicaid/Medicare are merely steps towards what we should be doing: some sort of government funded health insurance that anyone can participate in.

These are the kinds of stimulus that we should be funding. Our health care system has a lot of problems but certainly one is the redundant and archaic paper-based records and billings system. Nearly every discussion of how to reform health care, whether from the left or from the right, mentions information technology reform as a means for saving money (see below the fold). Therefore, it is good to see that a full $20 Billion has been approved in the House stimulus bill for Health Infrastructure Projects. From the story at Robert Wood Johnson Foundation:

Approved under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the bill would provide incentive payments to Medicare and Medicaid providers who implement certified electronic health record technology.

This started off as a comment over in James' post about Doug Berger's ideas on the budget. I started to comment that Republican Pete Brunstetter had one crazy idea and one not so crazy idea.

What two things would you cut in the state budget? "I'm not a big fan of the More at Four program," Brunstetter said. "I don't think it has had the impact that justifies the cost."

He added that there needs to be some consideration of merging More at Four with Smart Start, another pre-school program.

Getting rid of early childhood education programs is so stupid I can't even comment, but the idea of merging two pre-school programs into one overhead makes sense.

But, this is where my bullshitometer went off.

If you or your parents are not yet 65 you’ll probably ignore what I have to say thinking this won’t apply to me. You’ll be making one of the biggest mistakes of your life.

If you or one or someone in your family has to go into a Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF) the current cost, in North Carolina, is about $72,000 yearly. I’m going to focus on details surrounding folks who are 65 or older who qualify for Medicare. Anyone younger who needs a SNF, unless they have good Health Care Insurance that pays for some “rehab” time in a SNF, or has been smart enough to purchase Long Term Care (LTC) insurance is likely in deep financial trouble.