Home nursing is, for those patients that can benefit from it, much cheaper than being confined to a hospital. It is cheaper for insurance companies, it is cheaper for hospitals, it is cheaper for the nation, and we can't seem to muster a commitment to it when it comes to the nation's sick children because hell if anybody knows.
Lost amid the Trump administration’s drive to dismantle the Affordable Care Act—and the uncertain future of the government Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP)—is the ongoing plight of children stuck in hospital beds long beyond what’s medically necessary. Unlike the elderly, for whom a certain level of health care is guaranteed under Medicare, children in the U.S. have no overarching protections.
Maybe it's the national political movement to hurt sick children for the sake of hurting them. You know: Paul Ryan's keg dream.
DeCarlo and her husband signed up for a so-called Katie Beckett waiver, a mechanism that was set up to allow parents above the Medicaid income threshold to enroll a child with severe needs in the federal program. The waiver, created in 1982 with the backing of then President Ronald Reagan, was named for a three year-old girl who was stuck in the hospital because Medicaid wouldn’t pay for home care. When they enrolled in Connecticut, the DeCarlos were told they were 147th in line—giving them about a six- to eight-year wait for home nursing coverage.
Why are we doing this to parents? Because we can. Parents of sick kids can't afford lobbyists and that means nobody in Washington gives a damn. Yes, yes, I realize this is completely mean-spirited and untoward and rude. Prove me wrong, One Damn Person. Prove me wrong.
While on an individual basis it almost always makes more financial sense for a child to be cared for at home instead of in a hospital, raising home-nursing rates could increase a state’s overall expenditure, particularly if all the parents currently operating as nurses were suddenly free to return to work. And at a time when continued federal funding is in doubt for CHIP, which provides coverage for 9 million children, securing government dollars to pay for higher wages would seem a steep uphill battle.
Personally I think the Paul Ryan movement is closer to promoting euthanasia as means of clearing the rolls of sick children than to undertake any substantive effort to help them. There's not a stitch of goodwill or any moral compass to be seen there; it's been, to date, entirely absent. We are a meaner country than we were in 1982 by a wide margin, and getting much meaner, and every one of us can name the names causing that to happen.
Wouldn't I feel sheepish if the faux-pious Ryan made any move at all to fix these problems. Wouldn't I have egg on my face. Wouldn't we all feel like total heels for presuming him and his party to be such monsters. And yet none of us are holding our breath waiting for him, or them, to even lift a finger to keep current CHIP recipients on the health care we once had the human decency to provide them, because anyone who has paid the slightest attention to the Paul Ryan agenda knows there isn't a shred of base compassion to be had there. He'll host another camera-ready event at a homeless shelter and American children will continue to die because their parents are Too Poor and their congressmen too indecent, and we'll continue this pattern until the long-distant day when the American psyche shifts again and can no longer stomach it.
Prove me wrong, Paul Ryan. Lift one finger and prove me wrong.