Thousands to Get Kicked Off Medicaid, CHIP
Another unintended consequence of Obamacare:
The enrollees who are at greatest risk are pregnant women, children and blind and disabled individuals who were enrolled in Medicaid prior to the effective date of two Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act provisions — the 2014 expansion of coverage to all adults with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty level, and the establishment of a new formula to define household income under the Modified Adjusted Gross Income (MAGI) standard. (Virgil Dickson, Modern Healthcare)
One of the greatest harms that Obamacare has inflicted is to have increased the fragmentation of access to health insurance. People in the part-time working class will be the worst affected: Churning between Medicaid and Obamacare exchanges, maybe twice a year or more, depending on changes in their incomes.
It was always hard to keep people who are eligible for Medicaid continuously covered: They do not have to sign up during open enrollment; and because they have to re-affirm their income eligibility periodically, they have no incentive to stay enrolled if they are healthy.
The solution to this unnecessary fragmentation is a universal, refundable tax credit that allows every American to buy health insurance that suits his or her family’s needs.
If GM or Ford designed cars like Obamacare was designed, they’d be out of business.
The underlying article for this post bases the claim that thousands are being thrown off of Medicaid on the fact that they are not replying to redetermination notices.
There’s another possibility–that the bureaucracy has been focused on building Medicaid enrollment for over a decade and hasn’t bothered to check eligibility. As a result, thousands of people on the Medicaid rolls do not belong there because they are dead, have moved out of state, or have gotten a job.
From February to June, 2014, the Illinois Medicaid Redetermination project, for example, found that almost 181,000 enrollees in Illinois Medicaid were ineligible.
Thank you. I should forewarn readers that we are about to issue a paper in 2015 that puts a twist in our notion of a universal refundable credit for everyone. I might regret the last line in my post.