2020: I didn't end your coverage, you ended your coverage // Rockabye


Sara Rosenbaum, a Jedi-level health policy wonk, breaks down the details of the draft plan as it stood last week, highlighting a number of its problems. The same Commonwealth Fund blog brings us up to date this week with this explainer which emphasizes a key problem: in the House plan, in 2020 once you are out of Medicaid, you're out for good. But many of the working poor, particularly those who work seasonally, go in and out of eligibility. Basically the plan stalls until 2020, when it stealthily, steadily, and irrevocably culls the ranks of Medicaid expansion beneficiaries. It does this by booting current beneficiaries as soon as they work too much and lose eligibility for Medicaid, (while making a lot of noise about work requirements, personal responsibility, etc, etc); then allowing no new beneficiaries; and, most of all, never explicitly admitting to the goal of reducing the number of beneficiaries.

So, in summary, it starts as an incoherent mish-mash of modifications and quietly morphs into the "I didn't end your coverage, you ended your coverage" Medicaid destruction plan.

 * * *

Nothing like a single mom song to get the blood boiling on the contraction of Medicaid expansion.