Posted on 12/08/2013 5:07:21 AM PST by Libloather
See my Post #16. Some of your questions are answered there.
A huge problem for states who set up their own exchanges and accepted the Medicaid expansion is that, in additional to the increased costs they will bear starting in 2015, they lack the number of medical professionals necessary to treat all the new Medicaid enrollees.
I don’t know about that. I just know that we have a bloated bureaucracy and I find it hard to believe that an illegal, say, in the emergency room for what they declare as an emergency can be automatically signed up for Medicaid.
If this were true, then why did 1.46 million of the 1.6 million who have signed up for CACA have to got through all this trouble? Seems to me they could have taken their cold or booboo to the nearest emergency room and gotten it automatically if that were true.
Instead of meaning a payment pool against an expensive but improbable occurrence, it now means that PLUS an arbitrarily mandated menu of ongoing prepaid health services. If those are subsidized (and Medicaid is totally subsidized), so much the better for the sign-up statistics.
The Obamacare legislative crew seems to believe that if you sign people up for preventive care through Medicare, you will bend the cost-curve down because they'll be healthier, and because underpaid preventive care is cheaper than hospital emergency room care.
Then you have to include Medicare and Tricare Life, which is Ret. Military over 65 secondary to Medicare. They are both admined out of the same offices. You really only need to have filed to your RX, hospital or doctor, or PT or test to trigger the TFL. And both reimburse the medical community poorly. Husband’s who is the Ret. SCPO 2 day ER stay, because the small hospital had no rooms left, for a sudden BP spike, was $50K, the 2 agencies paid the facility $2,500, and sent us a medicine co-pay.
The biggest thing is the FRAUD in all the programs.
Medicare Fraud: http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/2013/02/22/how-big-is-medicare-fraud/
If you do Welker’s math, the annual cost of fraud ranges from $75 billion to $250 billion. That’s a lot of our hard-earned retirement money.
Indiana Medicaid pays out $130 Million on health care for ILLEGALS! That is only one small state, not one of those massive states like Kali.
Nah; the legislature just voted themselves a big, fat pay raise. They’ll be fine and dandy in the Land of Fruits & Nuts.
From NY Times 9/12/2012:
"Over all, 31.5 percent of Medicaid’s $400 billion in shared federal and state spending goes to long-term care for the elderly and the disabled."
****Those states without exchanges are going to be excoriated and labeled every liberal class warfare slur in the book.****
You are correct. Virginia has no exchanges or new Medicaid participation for the reasons you mentioned and here is the liberal sludge being spewed as you accurately pointed out. This is an excerpt from an editorial in the “Virginian Pilot” (See more at http://www.Pilotonline.com under “All Columnists”)
Only politicians in Washington can change the terms of that law; lawmakers in Richmond must make the best of the hand they’re dealt.
In this case, federal law requires Virginians to pay $10 billion in new taxes over the next five years. If Virginia doesn’t expand Medicaid, all that money will go to other states that have decided to expand the Medicaid eligibility criteria.
In effect, Virginia would be subsidizing efforts to improve health care and tamp down costs in other states while ignoring its own vulnerable residents.
If Virginia does expand Medicaid, the money would return to the commonwealth.
Coming soon to a Democrat Agenda near you will be the "Doctors Are Required to Support Medicaid or Lose Their Licence" bill.
Guaranteed.
An added bonus: Chief Justice Roberts will rule that this is just a "Tax" not a threat or a punishment or even a new form of Palin-like slavery.
Based upon some other articles, people put their information into one of the Obamacare sites, and then plans are presented...unless you qualify for Medicaid, in which case it automatically signs you up without giving you a further choice.
I guess that the way Obamacare works, the Federal Government taxes Virginia, for example, $5 Billion in new Medicaid charges and then says they don’t get any of it back unless they agree to pay more in future taxes by participating in Medicaid Expansion.
On the street I believe that’s called extortion.
I believe you mean Medicaid. There are reports that with the doctor shortage in some areas, inc. those that will not accept Medicaid patients, there will be waits of months before Medicaid patients can see a doctor. So much for preventive care.
Yes, you're right, for now. I've made that typo before.
As to the "for now," I can tell you from personal observation that choices for Medicare are becoming more limited, too, although the situation is nowhere near as limited as for Medicaid.
Thankfully that is up to 138% of the poverty level
Ah but they can. Its done all the time here in fl. That's how the hospital usually gets something reimbursed for "free" care.
I don’t understand this. What’s the difference between someone who is signed up for Medicare, and someone who shows up poor at the hospital, unsigned, and gets free care that is paid for by Medicaid?
.............................................................
difference
.
Medicare patients pay a monthly premium, deductibles and 20% co-pays.
.
medicaid patients pay nothing
.
big differences
I could be wrong about but I’d have to see proof of this. Not arguing that it isn’t so, but I’d have to be shown it’s true.
Heretofore, costs for county hospitals, etc. have been funded by the taxpayers, Grady Hospital in Atlanta being one. The $10 aspirin is an example of how a hospital will recoup these costs from a paying insurance customer.
And don’t forget the inmates.
“What our founding fathers knew instinctively is just now beginning to dawn on people who have become dependent on “popular” government programs.”
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I agree totally! Some people imagine themselves to be more intelligent than our founding fathers simply because so much has changed in a way that, “They could not have foreseen”, I say that is bovine droppings. Every year added to my time on Earth convinces me more and more that, in the things that really matter in governing, the founding fathers were so far ahead of our current thinking that it is astounding. When I think of who might be on their level now the first name I think of is Dr. Thomas Sowell, he is one of a very few today who is capable of the clarity of writing exhibited by the founding fathers. He is also one of a VERY small number who seem to have anything resembling the understanding of human nature which is evident in their writings. They understood that what is desirable is far different from what is possible and the meaning of the old saying, “Leave WELL ENOUGH alone.” We are now plagued with millions of self-proclaimed do-gooders who understand none of that. Too many Americas want to follow a false Messiah into the pit of a MAN MADE hell.
As planned, 1/2 of the projected ‘newly insured’ under PPACA were to come from Medicaid expansion. The Supreme Court screwed up their plans when it un-mandated the Medicaid expansion mandate. That was a huge surprise and shocker to the architects of PPACA ... but they kept it low key in the media. You hardly saw any reporting on this Supreme Court decision.
24 states chose not to expand Medicaid. In the 26 states that did expand instead of 1/2 going to Medicaid as projected, 3/4 of new enrollees are going into Medicaid! If that would have happened in all 50 States the whole thing would have collapsed by now.
So, in hindsight, the hold-out States should have adopted the Medicaid expansion so that this thing could have collapsed faster.
“they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
This is not an ala carte menu. If you compromise on any, you compromise all of them.
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”
THIS is the proper response to the Death Panels that people complain about - NOT some additional laws to safeguard peoples access to the fruits of other peoples labors.
If you’ve counted on infringing on others liberty towards your own well-being, you are not an American, you are a tyrant.
We’ve created hundreds of millions of little tyrants who expect to take others hard work and assign it to themselves simply because they claim somebody in government promised it to them.
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