Gov. Cuomo’s administration is launching an aggressive plan to sign up thousands of ex-cons for taxpayer-financed Medicaid, which they’ll receive once they leave prison, The Post has learned.
Under the initiative, all inmates would automatically apply for the public health insurance for the needy while incarcerated, state Department of Health officials said. Those who meet the income requirements will be placed on the Medicaid rolls upon dischargeCritics say the plan offers no incentive for convicted felons to find work after lockup.
“It’s an extremely liberal approach to benefit prisoners. It shouldn’t be ‘Medicaid on demand.’ It gives the prisoners no incentive to get a job so they can get their own health insurance. This is unfair to the hardworking taxpayers of New York,” fumed state Conservative Party chairman Mike Long.“Evidently, crime does pay.”
Health officials defended the program as bolstering public health. “The incidences of communicable and noncommunicable diseases tend to be higher in the prison population. It also prevents unnecessary spread of illness in the community,” said Dr. Jo Ivey Boufford, chairwoman of DOH’s Public Health and Planning Council panel, which is reviewing the issue.
Authorities declined to say how many prisoners would be eligible, but even a conservative estimate would be in the thousands. There are 56,000 convicts in prisons or other facilities. In 2010, 25,308 inmates were discharged. Meanwhile, 2.2 million New Yorkers statewide are uninsured, or about 15 percent of all adults between the ages of 18 and 64.
SOURCEhttp://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/medicaid_eyed_for_all_ex_cons_8xN6K99jLwTdsEjE73r1kI
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“Evidently, crime does pay,” fumed state Conservative Party chairman Mike Long WRT Gov Cuomo's plans to sign up thousands of ex-cons for tax-financed Medicaid to be placed on the rolls upon discharge. There are 56,000 convicts. In 2010, 25,308 were discharged.
There are as many starting points for the mortgage meltdown as there are fears about how far it has yet to go, but one decisive point of departure is the final years of the Clinton administration, when a kid from Queens without any real banking or real-estate experience was the only man in Washington with the power to regulate the giants of home finance, the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), better known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis. He took actions that—in combination with many other factors—helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded "kickbacks" to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans. Three to four million families are now facing foreclosure, and Cuomo is one of the reasons why.
What he did is important—not just because of what it tells us about how we got in this hole, but because of what it says about New York's attorney general, who has been trying for months to don a white hat in the subprime scandal, pursuing cases against banks, appraisers, brokers, rating agencies, and multitrillion-dollar, quasi-public Fannie and Freddie. . . (Excerpt) Read more at villagevoice.com ...
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