PA. Repubs: Providing Health Insurance Will Hurt Health of Poor People; Won't let hospitals speak

[JPZenger]

Last edited Fri Jun 21, 2013, 12:37 PM - Edit history (2)

http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2013/06/medicaid_expansion_pennsylvani_1.html#/0

Headline: Medicaid expansion opponents argue it will "harm" the health of the uninsured as well as the state budget

Excerpt:

"Republican state legislators today presented a slate of speakers who oppose expanding Medicaid in Pennsylvania. Speakers argued expanding Medicaid will eventually require state tax increases, the federal government will break its funding promise, and even that Medicaid "harms" the uninsured.

Meanwhile, Democrats called the House Health Committee hearing a "sham" because it included no speakers who favored the expansion, which is part of Obamacare. They had to settle for trying to make their points by way of questions to the speakers.

The proposed expansion would open Medicare to people earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, which is about $32,000 for a family of four. The federal government promises to cover 100 percent of the cost for the first three years, with the federal share gradually dropping to 90 percent."

A republican legislator from Florida said that poor people should not be offered health insurance because there won't be enough doctors to serve them all. After all, we need to keep the doctors for ourselves.

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Because Dem legislators were given little time to ask questions and no time to present testimony, they had to respond with a statement afterwards:

http://www.pahouse.com/Frankel/PAHouseNews.asp?doc=29728

Excerpts:

" Three independent, nonpartisan studies have shown the federally funded expansion would benefit Pennsylvania. "These are gold-standard studies. No one in their right mind would question the integrity of the RAND Organization, the Pennsylvania Economy League or the legislature's Independent Fiscal Office," Frankel said.

Eight Republican governors – including the governors of Ohio and New Jersey – support the Medicaid expansion in their states. Arizona's very conservative governor even threatened to veto all other legislation until the expansion was passed.

If the Corbett administration and Republican legislators refuse the federal money, Pennsylvanians' tax dollars will be paying to cover people in other states. If they accept it, it would save about $90 million in the upcoming 2013-14 state budget alone.

The federal government would pay 100 percent of the expansion cost for the first three years, which would phase to 90 percent after that. There is no history of the federal government cutting back on its share of Medicaid costs, as some Medicaid opponents have predicted."

[JPZenger]

1. If 500,000 more people have insurance, more doctors will come to PA.

This thinking is so out of touch. One Repub says that poor people shouldn't receive federally funded medical assistance, because there are not enough doctors to meet all of their needs. If you have 500,000 additional people in your state who can pay for health care, it will help to attract more health care professionals to PA. Conversely, if a state like Maryland has a much higher percentage of its population with health insurance than PA., doctors will naturally be attracted to settle in Maryland instead. The nurses and other health care professionals will naturally follow wherever the jobs are offered.

[undergroundpanther]

2. keep all the doctors for ourselves.

The true sociopath is revealed in this republican pig from florida.He opens his slobbering maw ...fuck the poor I want more... We need to get these sociopaths OUT of power and away from any public services they'd exploit.

[JPZenger]

3. Here's info on the study being used to attack Obamacare and Medical Assistance

http://mediamatters.org/research/2011/06/09/wash-times-pushes-flawed-study-on-medicaid-to-a/180449

The link has information on a study that is being mis-used across the country to try to stop any expansion of medical assistance. The study found poor health results after surgery for people on Medicaid. The Repubs are now claiming that is it better for people to have no insurance than to be on Medicaid. Let us also remember that the city and public hospitals that receive the higher numbers of Medicaid patients often are underfunded.

Excerpt from the study authors' postscript:

"Another possible explanation for the differences we observed among payer groups is the possibility of incomplete risk adjustment due to the presence of co-morbidities that are either partially or unaccounted for in our analyses...Several explanations for inherent differences in payer populations have been suggested. Factors including decreased access to health care, language barriers, level of education, poor nutrition, and compromised health maintenance have all been suggested.

.... NIS is a large, administrative database, and the potential for unrecognized miscoding among diagnostic and procedure codes as well as variations in the nature of coded complications must be considered. Further, we are only able to comment on short-term outcomes as data collected for NIS reflects a patient's inpatient admission. Consequently, the results reported herein may underestimate true perioperative mortality and morbidity rates that may have occurred following the patient's discharge.

....For example, the proportion of Medicaid patients may be artificially inflated due to the fact that normally Uninsured patients may garner Medicaid coverage during a given hospital admission.... Due to the constraints of NIS data points, we are unable to include adjustments for other well-established surgical risk factors such as low preoperative albumin levels or poor nutrition status. However, upon sensitivity analyses our statistical models proved resilient to the presence of a potentially unmeasured confounder"