Turning The Ballot Box Against Republicans

Paul Ryan Seems Excited To Kick People Off Medicaid

WASHINGTON ― House Speaker Paul Ryan sees repealing Obamacare as a historic opportunity to reduce the welfare rolls.

In an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Friday, Ryan (R-Wis.) compared his legislation repealing the Affordable Care Act to the vaunted 1996 welfare reform law, which basically ended the federal government’s commitment to cash assistance for parents in poverty.

“This is so much bigger, by orders of magnitude, than welfare reform,” Ryan said.

Obama’s Affordable Care Act made more people eligible for Medicaid, which currently provides health insurance for nearly 70 million Americans. The Republican health care bill would roll back Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion and also dramatically reform the way Medicaid works.

States currently administer Medicaid with a commitment from the federal government, amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars per year, to help pay for as many enrollees as might be eligible due to low income. The Republicans’ American Health Care Act would limit that open-ended commitment by capping federal funding for states based on the number of enrollees rather than the cost of their medical claims.

As Ryan put it on Friday, “We are de-federalizing an entitlement, block granting it back to the states, and capping its growth rate. That’s never been done before.”

Indeed, the legislation’s per capita funding caps have never been tried in a public benefit program, according to the Center for Law and Social Policy, a liberal think tank that generally opposes cutting antipoverty funds.

Paul Ryan Seems Excited To Kick People Off Medicaid

Medicaid sucks. The quality of care is terrible,

then the government seizes your children's inheritance when you die.

Swapping that for a tax credit to help buy REAL insurance from the health care exchange

Like the old Henny Youngman joke, compared to what? You think no affordable coverage, (and if you make $9.50/hr, no meaningful coverage is going to be affordable), beats Medicaid coverage?

Medicaid is much, much better than you portray it.

Not all doctors accept it, but many do and general practitioners are located in Medicaid approved centers in most towns. Referrals to specialists who accept Medicaid are given at those centers.

A. Only if you were 55 or older and on Medicaid, not Medicare, or permanently instutionalized in a nursing home or similar facility. If you took Medicaid while you were 35 it isn't recovered from your estate.

Exchange or not, how much extra can someone supporting themselves on $9.50 an hour pay? About zero. Yet $9.50 an hour will put a person above the old Medicaid cutoff line that Republicans are trying to re-instate with this new bill.

Not all doctors accept Medicare either, but enough do that anyone over 65 who lets politicians take away his/her Medicare is crazy.

Oralloy is showing limited thinking.

Health care cover is only as good as the money put in,

and only in America are costs recovered from an individual's estate.

That's because the American health system is a crap system that no other developed nation would want.

Most of the really good doctors don't accept it [Medicaid]. But yes, if you are on Medicaid you can find a mediocre-to-poor doctor. Maybe a few who are really lucky will find a good doctor who is committed to helping the poor. Most won't though.

That isn't the only problem with Medicaid. Think about how cheap HMOs deny all sorts of worthwhile procedures. Medicaid is about the worst of all the HMOs. People on Medicaid shouldn't expect to get even commonplace treatment. Instead they should expect to be required to have some long-obsolete procedure from the 1800s done because that is the only procedure that is "approved".[/color]

Check the record of malpractice claims-how many people know who the really good doctors are? It has as much to do with personality as anything else. Besides, medical care is divided into two parts-the "regular doctor", or General Practitioner, and various specialists. The GP handles checkups and relatively easy stuff, the involved things he or she sends out to specialists. The Medicaid GPs are usually located in a clinic near the middle of towns, Medicaid patients don't usually go to "normal" GPs.

However, the more involved and difficult conditions go out to specialists, and Medicaid has a list of specialists who take Medicaid patients. Many specialists do not, but many do. In addition, if there is a clinic connected to the hospital itself-physically or administratively-such as rheumatology, osteopaths, etc, they will also take Medicaid. I've gotten to know some people who were on Medicaid for awhile,and it sure looked to me that they were covered pretty well, and the specialists they went to were the same specialists people on major insurance plans went to.

I didn't know that procedures like colonoscopies, MRIs and CAT scans were being performed in the 1800s, because I've known Medicaid patients they were performed on. Moreover, much was made in the early days of the ACA about some states which did not agree to the Medicaid expansion. The Medicaid expansion is when they changed the top income limit to qualify for Medicaid from $9,000 a year to $18,000 a year for a single person, and more for a family. It therefore allowed many more people to qualify for Medicaid who did not before. Jan Brewer, Arizona's governor, refused to join in the Medicaid expansion. On TV they interviewed three Arizonans who had severe and expensive conditions, heart and lung, and if Brewer continued to refuse to join the Medicaid expansion, they would die. If Brewer did join, they could get a life-saving operation. Brewer never did sign the expansion, at least not at that time. I know at least one did die, I don't know about the others, (maybe some generous philanthropist came forward, for their sake I hope so).

There are some "non-approved" procedures, but these tend to be cosmetic, Medicare offers the same life-affecting care as regular medical care, from what I can see from people I know.

I take it from your posts that the right wing media, of which I am sure you partake, has decided to push the Trump health care bill which would cut the top allowable income for Medicaid from $18,000 a year down to $9,000 a year by saying untrue things about the quality of Medicaid insurance.

The purpose of this is to make it seem that the low wage worker won't be missing much when he gets thrown off the program for making too much-like a dollar or two more per hour over minimum wage. This will leave these millions of workers without affordable insurance, and a tax credit is not going to do these workers much good in having the ability to get health insurance.

This is why four Republican senators have come forward and said they will not vote for the Trump health care bill if the Medicaid expansion is not put back into the bill. If they hold fast to that promise and everyone else votes along party lines, (Democrats against, Republicans for), the ACA repeal will not pass the Senate.

Sometimes the best general practitioner is an idealist who goes to serve Medicaid patients.

Much more often the best general practitioners become regular doctors who serve the paying public.

If poor people were able to buy from the exchanges, they would be able to go to "normal" general practitioners.

For every person who is lucky enough to get approval to consult a specialist, there are many who are denied permission.

With a quality PPO from the exchange, you don't have to ask permission from the insurance company whenever you want to see a specialist, as long as that specialist is "in network".

Before Obamacare forced people off traditional health insurance, people didn't even have to confine themselves to networks.

So while the rest of the world enjoys modern procedures that are much better cosmetically, people on Medicaid enjoy the cosmetics of procedures from the 1800s.

People on Medicaid can find that their only "approved" medicines have lots of unpleasant side effects. Nothing that is terribly dangerous to their health, but nothing very desirable either.

And these are not cases of "cheap verses expensive" medicine either. People on Medicaid get routed to medicine with unpleasant side effects even when those medicines have long been replaced by very cheap generics that have no side effects.

I don't think there is any such thing as right-wing media.

However, the criticisms of Medicaid are true. It really is a bad deal.

Like izzythepush said, when it comes to health care, you get what you pay for.

I'm a survivor of kidney failure, because I had excellent doctors at Kaiser - and covered under Medicare.

Not true. There are any of a number of reasons why a doctor might choose to work for a company instead of starting his own practice, not least of which is the insurance is taken care of by his company. A doctor who is part of a practice is also a businessman and not everyone wants that.

Not the experience of the people I know. Why would a GP try to handle something that belongs to a specialist-if something goes wrong with the treatment, the GP's on the hook.

Medical knowledge has expanded and keeps expanding so much that the percentage of it a single doctor can keep up with gets ever smaller, hence the growth of specialists who can keep up in a narrower field.

You don't have to ask permission from the insurance company, but you DO have to get a referral from your GP, unless you are already seeing that specialist.

You don't hurt your leg and look up an osteopath in the yellow pages. At least for the first time you see them, they expect you to be referred by another doctor.

oralloy wrote:

Before Obamacare forced people off traditional health insurance, people didn't even have to confine themselves to networks.

Untrue. Medical networks, (HMOs), predated the Affordable Care Act by at least two decades.

What are the cosmetics of colonoscopies, MRIs and CAT scans? Because I've known them done on Medicaid. I've known people on Medicaid who were in the hospital for weeks and others who have had heart operations on it.

Enough of this 1800s nonsense.

Generally the emphasis is on getting generic drugs, which are always considerably cheaper, in preference to name brand drugs.

I've seen no evidence that Medicaid recipients don't have all generic drugs covered.

Medicaid will even cover non-generic drugs if you need them, but it will take paperwork.

I think you've been misled by a blog.

Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Drudge, Breitbart, the list goes on.

Your criticisms of Medicaid are nothing like how Medicaid actually works.

I've driven friends on Medicaid to see their specialists, and these are the same specialists that I saw with my insurance from my job.

One person I know got a cardiac catheter procedure done by one of the cardiologists in the practice of the Head of Cardiology in the local hospital.

The criticisms of Medicaid you have given are directly opposite to what people I know have experienced.

About the only criticism with even a germ of truth was the fact that Medicaid's network of specialists is considerably smaller than private HMOs' network of specialists.

Of course, it should be pointed out that fewer people are on Medicaid than private HMOs, so fewer specialists are needed.

Meanwhile, some specialists do see Medicaid patients, whether for altruistic or other reasons, and like I said, if the hospital has a clinic attached to it, like for rheumatology or cardiology and such, they also take Medicaid. The choice of specialists is smaller, your General Practitioner will be a Medicaid doctor and not a "normal" doctor, but the system works pretty damn well, that I can see.

again any system that allows Sandy Hook is evil.