Medicaid, one of the key programs undergirding the social safety net, is currently surrounded by threats from all sides.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1449737
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1449737
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And this is happening at the same time that private healthcare insurance premiums and healthcare costs in general are rising in an aging society. Don’t tell me the opposition to Medicaid by GOPs isn’t race and class related either.
I live in Texas. When I think about this issue, I think about Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama. Poorest states in the country and run by Medicaid hating Republicans who have no alternative solutions.
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Next are Social Security and Medicare. Goobers want to steal what working people contribute to these programs.
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Medicare is in just as much trouble, because the threat is backed by both parties. Medicare Advantage and ACO-REACH both have support from R’s and D’s. I think most of our representatives have no clue about ACO-REACH, but they should all realize that the “Advantage” in Medicare Advantage plans goes to the plan issuer. Unless you can point me to the altruistic Insurance companies that do not seek profits, every issuer is either making a profit on the individual subscriber (BAD) or on the entire Medicare program WORSE). Some Democrats recognize this, but not enough IMO.
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Hi! To find out what I can do, say @discobot display help.
At least the GOP is consistent with being anti-medicaid&medicare&social security. They were against masks and are pro-any-type-of-weapon too.
The only way this makes sense is it must be the lobby with the most power in the GOP is the funeral home business.
First Edit: And oh, how could I forget anti-Affordable Care Act.
Second Edit: And, about that insulin price gouging…
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more than 15 million Americans could lose coverage
America, ask yourselves why this many people are on Medicare and are threatened with losing it.
No problem letting the ultra rich not pay fair share of taxes, but people want to screw those without the ability to afford healthcare. Oh, I know, having healthcare is not a right in our society. We pay one way or another.
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Interesting, that I signed up for an “Advantage” plan starting Jan to find not only do all the things they state they cover are difficult or impossible to access. And, seems my co-pays are now higher. Huge advantage.
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No, their alternative is “Die, you sucker.”
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What fascinates me about this is that republican governors are going to try to kill millions of their own residents, and somehow its democrats’ fault.
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or outright stealing (SCOTT).
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None of those programs are in trouble unless we, the People, allow them to be. No where is it written that shortfalls to the dedicated taxes can’t be made up out of the General Fund. Nobody squawked when SS contributions were added to the General Fund under Saint Ronnie of Reagan to disguise the size of the deficits he ran up shovelling cash to the 1%. It’s only a problem when money or goods are going to help improve the lives of the hoi polloi. This is a made-up crisis. Senators Warren and Sanders are right to demand solutions other than gutting our benefits.
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A lot of people buy Advantage plans because they are cheaper than traditional Medicare plus a supplement. And while you are healthy, you might save some money. The kicker comes when you start needing actual healthcare and they either deny care or add copays to everything. By then, it is too late, because the supplemental plan people don’t have to accept you or they can charge a bunch extra, and traditional Medicare is not enough by itself.
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From a recent Paul Krugman article on Repug threatening medicaid.
"many conservatives are still stuck in a vision of American society that’s many decades out of date. (I keep thinking about the Florida officials who wanted to know whether the Advanced Placement course in African American history was “trying to advance Black Panther thinking.”) When they hear about means-tested programs, they think “welfare,” and when they think about welfare, they imagine that the beneficiaries are inner-city Black people.
In modern America, however, some of the biggest beneficiaries of means-tested programs are rural white people — who also happen to be the core of the Republican base.
Consider Owsley County, Ky. Eastern Kentucky is at the epicenter of the “Eastern Heartland,” a region that has been left stranded by the rise of the knowledge economy and the migration of jobs to highly educated metropolitan areas. The county is almost entirely non-Hispanic white; 88 percent of its voters supported Trump in 2020.
And 52 percent of its population is covered by Medicaid, while more than 40 percent are SNAP recipients.
Realities like this may explain why Medicaid appears to be highly popular, even among Republicans, and why large majorities of voters in states that haven’t yet expanded Medicaid appear to favor expansion. It’s true that politicians like Ron DeSantis who continue to block expansion haven’t paid any obvious political price. But as we saw in the political backlash against Trump’s attempt to repeal Obamacare, there’s a big difference between obstructing an expansion of social insurance and taking away benefits that have become an integral part of people’s lives."
The entire article from start to end is below and also at:
The Republican response to President Biden’s suggestion that they want to cut Medicare and Social Security has been basically that of the Monty Python knights to the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog: “Run away, run away!” But many in the party still appear to hope that they can make big spending cuts without hurting anyone they care about.
Many House Republicans are reportedly listening to Russell Vought, Donald Trump’s former budget director, who has a new think tank and has been circulating a budget proposal titled “A Commitment to End Woke and Weaponized Government,” which purports to show a way to balance the budget without touching Medicare and Social Security. The document uses the word “woke” 77 times, and — weirdly for a fiscal blueprint — also manages to mention critical race theory 16 times.
Anyway, the proposal relies in part on magical thinking — the assertion that conservative economic policies will cause a burst of economic growth that in turn increases tax receipts. Such claims have, of course, never — and I mean never — worked in practice. But it’s difficult to get politicians to understand something when their careers depend on their not understanding it.
More interesting, however, is the idea that we can achieve major spending cuts by taking on wokeness. What this means in practice is huge cuts to means-tested social insurance programs: Medicaid, Affordable Care Act subsidies and food stamps (or, to use the official term, SNAP, for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).
So now we know what many conservatives mean by being woke: It means showing any concern for, and offering any help to, Americans who are victims of adverse circumstances.
But if Republicans get anywhere close to carrying out the ideas in Vought’s blueprint, they’re going to get an education in both political and economic reality. The beneficiaries of the programs they want to gut aren’t the people they imagine, and the effects of slashing these programs would be far worse than they realize.
What’s going on in proposals like Vought’s, I believe, is that many conservatives are still stuck in a vision of American society that’s many decades out of date. (I keep thinking about the Florida officials who wanted to know whether the Advanced Placement course in African American history was “trying to advance Black Panther thinking.”) When they hear about means-tested programs, they think “welfare,” and when they think about welfare, they imagine that the beneficiaries are inner-city Black people.
In modern America, however, some of the biggest beneficiaries of means-tested programs are rural white people — who also happen to be the core of the Republican base.
Consider Owsley County, Ky. Eastern Kentucky is at the epicenter of the “Eastern Heartland,” a region that has been left stranded by the rise of the knowledge economy and the migration of jobs to highly educated metropolitan areas. The county is almost entirely non-Hispanic white; 88 percent of its voters supported Trump in 2020.
And 52 percent of its population is covered by Medicaid, while more than 40 percent are SNAP recipients.
Realities like this may explain why Medicaid appears to be highly popular, even among Republicans, and why large majorities of voters in states that haven’t yet expanded Medicaid appear to favor expansion. It’s true that politicians like Ron DeSantis who continue to block expansion haven’t paid any obvious political price. But as we saw in the political backlash against Trump’s attempt to repeal Obamacare, there’s a big difference between obstructing an expansion of social insurance and taking away benefits that have become an integral part of people’s lives.
Furthermore, although it may not matter much for the politics, it’s important to be aware that “woke” social insurance programs almost surely have important benefits beyond the financial support they provide.
First, the beneficiaries of these programs are disproportionately children. Medicaid covers 39 percent of all American children under 18; in West Virginia, another almost all-white and very Trumpy part of the Eastern Heartland, the number is 46 percent. More than 65 percent of SNAP recipients are families with children.
Why does this matter? Partly for moral reasons. Even if you’re one of those people who blame the poor for their own plight, children didn’t choose to be born into low-income households, so why should they be the prime targets of fiscal pain?
There are also practical reasons to provide aid to children, because today’s children are tomorrow’s adults — and they’ll be more productive adults if they have adequate nutrition and health care in their formative years.
This isn’t a speculative assertion. Both SNAP and Medicaid were rolled out gradually across the United States, creating a series of “natural experiments” — situations in which some children had early access to these programs and some otherwise similar children didn’t. And the evidence is clear: Childhood safety net programs lead to improved outcomes in adulthood, including better health and greater economic self-sufficiency.
Actually, the evidence for long-run economic payoffs to investing in children is a lot more solid than the evidence for payoffs to investing in infrastructure, even though the latter has bipartisan support while the former doesn’t.
So if you’re concerned about America’s future, which advocates of big budget cuts claim to be, slashing benefits for children is a really bad way to address your concerns.
And there’s another benefit to Medicaid, in particular: It helps keep rural hospitals alive. America has a growing crisis in simple availability of medical care in rural areas, presumably tied to the growing geographic divergence that has stranded places like eastern Kentucky. But the crisis is significantly worse in states that haven’t expanded Medicaid. That is, Medicaid doesn’t just help its direct recipients; it helps anyone seeking medical care, by helping to keep hospitals afloat.
Now think about what would happen if Congress slashed overall Medicaid funding. One likely result is that the rural-hospital crisis would go national.
So conservatives who think that targeting “woke” spending provides an easy way out of their dilemma — they want to shrink the government, but the big-money government programs are highly popular — are deluding themselves. If they get anywhere near actually realizing their plans, they’re going to face a rude awokening.
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Once again, the cruelty is the point. Them: “Why give these people free access to medical care? They might never get off the “public teat”!!1!” Me: I’m so tired of hearing these ridiculous arguments; Medicare for All. Get 'er done!
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Of course the opposition is race related. Furthermore, as there is a link between class and race, it is class related in the minds of many Whites.
But remember, there is a difference between taking away a benefit and denying giving a benefit. Medicaid is something many Republicans currently have and taking it away is likely to make Republicans pay a bigger price then denying their own voters a benefit they never had.
Kentucky shows why this is important. Under a Democratic Governor the ACA was implemented and the result was that 2 Whites received healthcare for every Black. Nationally, 70% of adults and their children who have healthcare thanks to Obamacare are White people with a high school degree or less living disproportionately in rural America especially in the South.
When a Republican governor in Kentucky tried to take away the ACA, while supporting their Republican senators for trying to kill Obamacare, the good people of Kentucky voted out the Republican governor for trying to take away their ACA.
That is going on 60 years after the civil rights movement made headway in evening the playing field for all Americans, the link between class and race in reality is not what it was 60 years ago. But in some people minds, especially those who have been denied access to the ACA, the link between class and race has not changed. That is racism has kept many White people from receiving a benefit they are entitled to but are denied from because of their very own failure to realize the benefit is for them.
That is in states that the ACA was never adopted, Republicans are not paying the same political price in states that have adopted it and Republicans want to take it away. Medicaid is in every state and has been for decades and taking Medicaid away means taking Medicaid away from many Republicans and, unlike denying them a benefit they never had, will likely have a political price.
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Healthcare has been the Achilles heel for Republicans, especially since they voted over and over in the House to end the ACA. Couple healthcare with the right to abortion, and the Dems will have to try hard not to win future elections. But try they and their consultant will.
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Just wanted to post that of the four people who wrote Josh about Wray’s disgusting appearance on Fox where he threw out as truth that the virus leaked from Wuhan lab and had been engineered to kill Americans door number two has it right. Until Wray releases to the public and not the propagandists at Fox his proof of this “new” information we have to assume that there is still not enough credible information available for the majority of our many Intell orgs to reach a conclusion. No government employee should be allowed on a right wing media outlet let alone the Director of the FBI to throw out unproven, unvetted intell. Do not trust Wray to ever not have a right leaning agenda. The dudes gotta go.
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They have two alternates
- Die
- Move to a blue state
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It was Grassley of Iowa who once said he was happy to be on the public teat. He’s 89, has been in office since 1980 and will run and win until he drops. That’s a whole lot of sucking.
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