kraftiekortie wrote:
There are poor-to-working class people who fall in the "bubble"---between being eligible for Medicaid and being able to pay for their own health care without insurance. The "bubble" is larger in some states (especially Southern states), smaller in others.
Massachusetts is an example of a state where most people have some sort of health insurance. The "bubble" is much less there.
And that's largely because those red states refused to expand Medicaid. It also hurts their hospitals, because emergency rooms must still take all comers regardless of ability to pay; but the ACA ended most of the subsidies hospitals received for uninsured patients, the idea being that the states would all expand Medicaid and pay through that. But because of most red states' ideological opposition to expanding Medicaid (and the unanticipated Supreme Court ruling that states could decline to expand Medicaid), the hospitals in those states are hurting, especially the rural hospitals.
Of course, the ACA has lots of problems regardless, due to its inability to control out-of-pocket costs and premiums, and it's essentially being bolt on to the preexisting employer-based system, which has its own multitude problems with access. (Granted, the ACA did expand health care access for lots of people who didn't have it previously, and got rid of preexisting conditions exclusions. I do give it credit for that.) Plus, Trump is starting to gut it, and to sell cheap plans that provide little coverage and serve only to chop up the insurance pools even further.
Our health care is a mess, and I don't think a bandaid here and a bandaid there will work. We need major systemic change. We need Medicare For All.
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"You have a responsibility to consider all sides of a problem and a responsibility to make a judgment and a responsibility to care for all involved." --Ian Danskin
04 Nov 2019, 10:41 pm
