The Republicans’ War on Medicaid
as incomes have stagnated and health-care costs have accelerated, Medicaid has turned into an essential support mechanism for millions of Americans who can’t be classed as poverty-stricken, strictly speaking, but who also can’t afford to bear the costs of private health coverage.
.. 74.6 million people were enrolled in plans supported by Medicaid or its sibling, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. That’s more than one in five of the U.S. population.
.. sixty per cent of all nursing-home residents now receive some sort of assistance from Medicaid.
Kids are also big beneficiaries: Medicaid and chip now help to provide medical coverage for about a third of all the children in America.
.. the Party doesn’t merely want to roll back the Obamacare reforms; it wants to shrink the entire program, transferring it to the states and imposing tight caps on the payments they receive from the federal government.
.. the bill would reduce over-all federal spending on health care by about $1.1 trillion over ten years. Of that,
- eight hundred and thirty-four billion dollars—fully three-quarters of the savings—would come from cuts to Medicaid.
.. spending on Medicaid would be reduced by a quarter compared to current spending. In the same time period, the number of people covered by Medicaid and chip would fall by about fourteen million
.. Donald Trump appeared to understand this when, from the beginning of his campaign, he promised not to cut Medicaid.
.. If you view the modern G.O.P. as basically a mechanism to protect the wealthy, Medicaid is an obvious target for the Party.
.. recent expansion was financed partly by an increase in taxes on the richest households in the country.
.. They also dislike that it’s working. As medical costs have risen and the private sector has failed to cover an increasing number of Americans, the Medicaid and chip programs have filled some of the coverage gap, and have done so relatively cheaply.
.. For any politician who loathes government interventions in the economy, and whose real goal is to head off socialized medicine, the expansion of Medicaid represents a serious threat.
.. Here is an embryonic single-payer system that is growing fast and could be further expanded pretty easily. That means it has to be crippled now, before it gets more firmly established.