Study: Romney-like plan cuts $1.7 trillion in Medicaid

[TomCADem]

Source: Washington Post

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney pointed to his Medicaid funding cuts during Monday night’s debate as one way to help balance the budget.

The Kaiser Family Foundation is out this morning with a deep dive into a plan that looks a lot like Romney’s. The big takeaway: Medicaid funding would be reduced by $1.7 trillion, with hospitals and nursing homes seeing payments fall by hundreds of billions of dollars.

Kaiser modeled a Medicaid block grant plan, where each state gets a capped amount of money to spend on its Medicaid population. That amount would grow 1 percent faster than inflation, the same target that the Romney campaign set, as did House Republicans in 2012.

Under that growth target, Medicaid funding would drop by $1.7 trillion between 2013 and 2022. About half of that cut would come from repealing the health care law’s Medicaid expansion. The other half would come from reducing payments to states for the Medicaid patients they already cover.


Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/10/23/study-romney-like-plan-cuts-1-7-trillion-in-medicaid/

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The media is generally ignoring this report (what else is new?), but in case you needed more evidence that the moderate Mitt theme is a fraud...

[KamaAina]

1. Nursing home funding should drop to near zero

home- and community-based services are cheaper in the long run and do not require seniors and people with disabilities (who make up fully one-quarter of the nursing home population) to live in isolation in soul-sucking institutions. Plus, the Supreme Court's 1999 decision in Olmstead v. L.C. guarantees our civil right to live in a community, not an institutional setting.

[KT2000]

2. just hope the loving republicans

welcome their aged, disabled and chronically ill relatives into their homes.

[WCGreen]

3. This Theory, as far as I can tell, of Romney's is all about shifting the governments participation in

end of life and disability care for those who need 24/7 attention.

For some reason, those who would cut funding, are saying this is all waste and that nothing will change as far as are goes.

But think about it. If you take that much cash out of end of life care, what would happen?

There are millions of people who depend on that industry for employment. If it does indeed collapses, is there anyone who really believes there is enough slack in the economy to absorb these folks?

And what would happen to the people who are left with only one alternative and that is to live with family. Now i remember my one hearing that my one great-grand mother stayed in my grandmothers home in a back room until she died. This was in the fifties so we aren't that far removed from having the family take on that responsibility.

And what if there is no family? Solyent Green?

Now ad in the fact that there would not be the same kind of health care available to those who are having just catastrophic medical insurance and you have a bad situation.

So unemployment goes up, especially for the those in lower income bracket, more people living in extended family situations and more people living hand to mouth.

Man, talk about a post modern dystopian nightmare.

[starroute]

4. And with more women in the work force, who would care for those elderly relatives?

It wasn't fun for the women, but at least I bet your grandmother wasn't trying to hold an outside job when she was caring for her aged mother. Right now, arrangements like that would be all but impossible for many families.

[WCGreen]

5. She worked and my aunt lived there to split the time...