As I said at the beginning, Medicaid is structured as an entitlement, i.e., the amount the government spends depends on the number of beneficiaries and the medical costs they incur, it isn't a set amount that's appropriated annually. However, the cost is split between the states and the federal government. For the original "categorically eligible" population -- children and their custodial parents, pregnant women, and dual-eligible Medicare beneficiaries, the federal government pays half the cost for the affluent states, and up to 70% for states with high poverty levels. For the "expansion" population -- everyone else up to 130% of the federal poverty level -- the federal government currently pays 90%.
The legislation that just passed the house requires $2 trillion in spending cuts, but an actual increase of $300 billion for the military and so-called border security, while providing $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, mostly for wealthy people and corporations, i.e. it would increase the federal deficit by more than $2 trillion. In case you didn't know already, Republicans do not care about deficit spending. Republican administrations always run up huge debts, which Democratic administrations are stuck with trying to pay off. That's been the patter since Reagan.
They also don't care about the people who vote for them. The only way they're going to get even close to those $2 trillion in spending cuts is by trashing Medicaid. There are a couple of ways to go about it. Obviously, they can cut the share the federal government pays, starting with the expansion population, sticking the bill with the states. So either your state taxes will go up proportionately, or those people will lose coverage. The other way, which they've wanted to do forever, is to make Medicaid a block grant rather than an entitlement. In other words, the states will get a lump sum, much lower than they get now, obviously, which again means either your state taxes go up, or people lose coverage.
Krugthulu explains what that will mean for the Trump cultists. Those low-income, rural states and areas that voted for Orange Julius will lose their medical care, their hospitals will close, there won't be any doctors to deliver their babies. What will happen to their old folks in the nursing home is difficult even to imagine. And the only reason for this is so that Elon Musk and Peter Thiel won't have to pay taxes.
2 comments:
Incredible that all this factual information is available ... and drowning in a sea of lies, ignorance and propaganda.
From Carl Sagan:
"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness ...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)
Sometimes I wish that Hindu cosmology was correct; and that some of these folks would be reincarnated in line with the karma (dharma?) they've accumulated in this life. .... And realize exactly how they got there.
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