In the movie “Hoosiers,” the Hickory High basketball team trudges to the locker room after a disastrous first half in its season opener. There the school principal approaches new coach Norman Dale and says, “Norm, I’m trying awfully hard to believe you know what you’re doing.”
And so it is that art sometimes imitates life, in this case the workings of our various levels of government as so many of us watch their flashes of incompetence and stupidity and wonder if these folks know what they’re doing.
Catherine Rampell, an outstanding columnist for the Washington Post, brings one example to our attention with a pair of pieces about the failings of our Medicaid system and the people who are getting hurt in the process.
As Rampell reports, early in the covid pandemic, a condition of federal funding was that states were temporarily barred from kicking anyone off Medicaid. As a result, the country’s uninsured rate fell to a record low.
Now that various emergency measures like this are being phased out, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 15.5 million people who remained on Medicaid because of special pandemic-era policies will be kicked off their converge by late 2024 – one third of them children. That’s about 20 percent of total Medicaid enrollment.
But here’s the shocker: the government estimates that nearly half of these people – about 6.8 million total – will be removed from the program even though they’re still eligible for it. The rate will be even higher for children: 72 percent.
How could this be happening? Rampell explained that these folks are “losing coverage for pointless bureaucratic reasons. Maybe a letter got sent to the wrong address. Or a beneficiary had difficulty with a broken government website. Ultimately this red tape is the same reason why lots of eligible families get purged even in a normal, non-end-of-pandemic year.”
Backing that up, in states that have publicly released breakdowns so far, the majority of people losing Medicaid are casualties of these paperwork-related reasons. The chart at the top of this blog shows the numbers from a handful of states.
Rampell uses this current situation to point to “a problem that has long ailed U.S. government programs at virtually all levels: how little federal and state policymakers have done to guarantee access to critical, promised safety-net benefits.”
She adds a sad observation, that in some states the process for providing social services like Medicaid or food stamps has been made deliberately difficult because some elected officials “want fewer poor people to get benefits … officials set up an obstacle course and hope some people get tripped off.”
But even states whose leaders want to help as many people as possible have exhibited failings that allow vulnerable families to fall through the cracks. One problem is that while the government has records that can be used to determine eligibility – such as payroll taxes – instead the burden of proof is usually placed on the applicants themselves.
This, of course, is disgusting. Thankfully Rampell’s work is an example of what a free press can do to keep our country informed. Think about that the next time you watch the Right try to discredit the media as a preemptive strike against its reporting of the truth.
You can read Rampell’s columns here:
The Great Medicaid Purge Begins
Government Incompetence Is Knocking Eligible Americans Off Medicaid
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It’s been written here that in the richest country in the world no one should die, suffer, or go bankrupt because they can’t afford health care. But in this case, the scariest part isn’t the availability of care. It’s system through which it’s provided.
In reality, it’s up to Democrats to make sure that we provide adequate help to people in need, and that this aid is delivered in a timely and efficient manner. Republicans, for the most part, sure as hell don’t care if some poor family loses out on vital medical coverage because it couldn’t navigate the system.
Plus, it gives them more material for their “government is the problem” message. Remember, the GOP’s effort to undermine our faith in government’s ability to function efficiently and their “smaller government” mantra are nothing more than diversionary talking points for their real goal: The shrinking of government – especially programs that help people – as an avenue for tax cuts that will favor the rich and corporations.
When we hear about things like this Medicaid fiasco we naturally wonder if those in government can do their jobs? We figure that politics has put people in positions they can’t handle, or that an over-complicated system is gumming up the works.
In a country where only one party is interested in governing, Democrats have to do a better job in making sure government functions effectively and that people know it. In the end, Democrats have to convince voters – without them having to try awfully hard –to believe they know what they’re doing.
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Thank you for reading my post. You can see more of my writing on my blog: Musings of a Nobody.