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Given that people are required to purchase insurance under Obamacare, and that subsidies are available for low-income people...why do we still have Medicaid? Seems redundant to have both programs. If current Medicaid recipients were moved onto an Obamacare plan we could shut down and entire government entitlement. Why isn't that a win for everyone?
Last edited by Toyman at Jewel Lake; 10-04-2013 at 02:04 PM..
Also, absorbing all Medicaid recipients and ending that program wouldn't change anything, really. That money would have to be reapplied for O'care subsidies for all of those incoming Medicaid folks. Eliminating Medicaid would also increase the size of the program and its budget substantially, since Medicaid is a matching program partly funded by individual states.
because medicaid has been cheaper historically then commercialized plans of a similar nature, with lower overhead. If anything we should argue for the opposite.
because medicaid has been cheaper historically then commercialized plans of a similar nature, with lower overhead. If anything we should argue for the opposite.
Link please, as opposed to an unsubstantiated claim.
I think we can agree that Obamacare is a financial disaster, perhaps as bad as Medicaid for the taxpayer.
Putting Medicare recipients on the ACA makes a lot more sense than Medicaid. Many Medicare recipients have enough resources to pay more for their health care. The ACA is means tested as is Medicaid. Medicare is not means tested. The main qualifications are 40 quarters of SS earning or being married to someone for 40 quarters. Why not put seniors on it and give them vouchers and give them free choice to pick the plans on the ACA? Isnt that what Republicans voted for twice in 2011 and 2012 with the Ryan Plan. If you are a Medicare recipient and a Republican you should be asking your congressman to allow seniors to sign up for the ACA.
You must remember that Obamacare does not cover long term care. When you run out of cash in a nursing home, you need Medicaid.
You could subsidize long-term care insurance, which is already being sold, under that sort of framework. If we're going down the road of having government involvement in long-term care and Medicaid for All, however, I think Medicare for All would be the best option, though it is a budget-buster currently while only covering a fraction of the population. For some reason Medicare seems less susceptible to the pitfalls that I outline below than many (most?) other government programs. This is consistent with other countries' single-payer health care plans being much more successful than most U.S. government programs in other areas.
To the OP, Medicaid is a big drain on the budget and is not much of a help in terms of health care, considering that very few doctors take it, and for old recipients there is a nasty little provision called "estate recovery", whereby the government basically steals inheritances from innocent adult children who have expected something all their lives. The livelihood and financial futures of the heirs are pulled out from under them, with the government's greed (far exceeding the private sector, c.f. the IRS) and relative lack of legal protections for the "debtors" completing a picture that looks more like a Gilded Age tie-the-heiress-on-the-tracks program than a welfare program that helps people. In this way it functions as a backdoor estate tax that targets the poor and middle class with very high rates. I don't doubt that people are helped by the program, but that help comes at a very steep price, so steep as to not be worth it.
Of course, if you have no assets in the first place you're not affected, and people who have big estates routinely hire lawyers to shift around their assets into trusts years before death so that they are not affected by Medicaid. It's the people who have assets but not enough assets to do estate planning that get hit by Medicaid - in other words, the middle class that is striving to build on and grow what little assets they have to become wealthier and live the American Dream. When most people in a country receive a sizable inheritance from their parents and build on it as they earn money, that is a boon to the middle class, and goes a long way towards raising living standards for future generations. If every generation has to start over from scratch, that makes it a lot harder for them to get ahead, and it is for this reason I think Medicaid contributed to the stagnation of the middle class over the past four decades. At any rate, the systematic discrimination against these people is unconscionable, and in my view is sufficient reason to abolish Medicaid altogether. The greed of the government, colluding with the medical industry to get their piece of the estate pie, combined with the conflict of interest that produces a lack of legal protections* demonstrates the inherent pitfalls of these sort of government programs.
*Imagine if credit card companies had absolute power to write the laws that govern credit card debt. That's basically the situation with many of these government programs. Student loans, for example, cannot be discharged through bankruptcy, and I suppose it is just a coincidence that the federal government is the top dog of the student loan market .
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