@Peter Frouman,
Peter Frouman wrote:I'm not sure where you are getting your information but it is not factual.
I see below that you have gone from
denying that the government seizes the assets of people on Medicaid when they die, to
justifying it.
Peter Frouman wrote:As I previously stated, the insurance exchange marketplaces created by the Affordable Care Act are not the only place where individuals can obtain healthcare insurance policies. When the ACA takes effect in January 2014, there will be about 250 million Americans with health insurance policies not purchased through the federal or state exchanges. It is and it will continue to be possible to purchase health care insurance outside the exchanges.
Where is this supposed "other source" of health insurance for individuals?
Peter Frouman wrote:The law does allow Medicaid to recover expenses it has paid from the person's estate. See
http://aspe.hhs.gov/daltcp/reports/estaterec.htm
Your statement that "[e]very time someone on Medicaid dies, the state seizes all their assets" is simply not true.
If a person's assets are greater than what the state has paid out, then yes. The state will only take their assets up to what the state paid out.
But as a practical matter, the state will almost always have paid out more than the sum of a person's assets.
Peter Frouman wrote:What is the problem with Medicaid recovering money it has spent on care from an estate? If the estate has or will have enough funds to repay those costs after its other debts have been paid, why shouldn't the government try to recover all or part of what it has spent on care for the deceased individual and thus reduce the burden to the taxpayers?
Well, if going on Medicaid were voluntary, the only thing wrong with this would be that it is a totally sucky thing to do.
Offering assistance to the poor, but making that assistance conditional on seizing possession of their family home, is something that might appeal to Ebenezer Scrooge (pre-ghosts).
However, the problem now goes beyond the mere fact that people on Medicaid lose all their assets when they die, because now ObamaCare is
forcing poor people to sign up for Medicaid, even if they'd prefer to pay for their own insurance so they can let their children inherit the family home.
Peter Frouman wrote:I find it very odd that some Republicans are so strongly opposed to requiring individuals (who have the means) to actually pay for the services they use. It seems that when they oppose the ACA, they suddenly become some sort of Communists or Socialists who think the government and the taxpayers should pay for everything and no one should have any individual responsibility for anything.
What Republicans are these?
Anyway, no. The people who act like Communists are the ones who force people into government programs against their will and then seize their family home to pay for those programs.
If you really want individual responsibility, give poor people the option of paying their own way instead of forcing them into a government program against their will and then demanding that they forfeit their family home to pay for the services you've forced them to take.