Medicaid's Failure

[jaykay]

My neighbor passed away tuesday from heart problems and emphysema. Ms Mae was one of the nicest people you would ever want to meet. She never had a bad thing to say about anyone. Our system failed her.She went to emergency and left there with 3 prescriptions to be filled. She took them to Walgreen's and they wouldn't fill them citing Medicaid would be out of money friday.What is to happen to the elderly when no one not even our so-called governor gives a da*n about them.Because a person is poor doesn't make them a burden. They are loved by someone ,a sister'brother,husband'wife 'child'g-child.It is a shame that our legislators worry more about trivial things than they do people's lives.

[zipzam]

jaykay said:

It is a shame that our legislators worry more about trivial things than they do people's lives.

sorry about your neighbor jaykay.

seems to be that way everywhere in the US. i heard arnold talking about "caleefoorneeya" yesterday. he went on and on about how they have to stop spending more than they take in. he keeps pushing that to the congress but they spend all their time (according to the governator) rehashing trivial matters instead of focusing on real solutions.

sounds real similar to MS don't it.

it's past time for our congress to get off their arses and find solutions. what are we paying them for?

[wittzo]

zipzam said:

it's past time for our congress to get off their arses and find solutions. what are we paying them for?

To vote themselves raises and benefits when no one's looking?

[wittzo]

It's starting to look very bleak concerning Medicaid..more and more doctors are refusing treatment if you use Medicaid. Luckily my kids have regular dental insurance, but we only have Medicaid for their health insurance. Dang.

[BillyBob]

wittzo said:

It's starting to look very bleak concerning Medicaid..more and more doctors are refusing treatment if you use Medicaid. Luckily my kids have regular dental insurance, but we only have Medicaid for their health insurance. Dang.

I'm hesitant to bring this up, cause I don't want to look like the grinch. But I always do anyway, so...
780,000 on MS Medicaid. That's about one out of every 3.5 MSippians on Medicaid. First is the question that must be asked- are there really more than 25% of us that are on such hard times that the tax payer must be paying all of our medical bills? Maybe there are. I don't know, I'm just asking. No doubt many are in a situation where the gov has to cover it, but more than one out of four?

I pay a shocking amount of money each month for my health insurance, which still has an eight hundred dollar yearly deductible per family member. It just went up from $250 deductible even as the price went up. That is through an employee group plan. But thank God I am able to pay it and not depending on the gov for this. That is a blessing to me. It's worse for private insurance, otherwise I would be completely self employed and buying private insurance.

Now I understand that there are those among the working poor who either can not get insurance, or the monthly premium would nearly eat up their entire take home check. OK. I see that. But are there really one out of four of us who are so poor that we can not afford to pay anything to the state for the health insurance it provides? Or we do not have family members who can pay something? Surely some can pay $10 a month, and some can pay $250 or more.

I don't know what part disability plays in Medicaid. In MS, there are 131,789 folks who receive Federal SS disability payments. Does that mean they also receive Medicaid? I really don't know. No doubt, many of these are truly disabled and could not possibly do a days work. But for the past 15 years, I will occasionally eat breakfast at a certain North MS eatery. If I get there late around 10am, every single day on those occasional weekdays I go there, a certain gentleman pulls up in his car. He vigorously walks into the eatery, orders breakfast, reads the paper and chain smokes cigarettes. Then, if he can get someone's attention, he will engage them in an intelligent discussion of current events. He has no physical limitations that anyone can see, and appears quite intelligent. Once I heard him leading a discussion of the pro's vs. con's of gold as an investment. The man has not worked these 15 years, and lives on various disability payments. Apparently, it is supposed to be some sort of mental disability. But I always wonder, can this apparently able bodied man not do ANY work to contribute to his upkeep? If he can, then how many more like him are there on the disability roles, as opposed to the truly disabled? How much does that sort of thing contribute to the crisis in the finances of the state of MS?

It all comes down to increasing taxes, and how much more each year the taxpayer is going to be forced to pay. I notice the deficit, just the amount they are in the hole, is $268,000,000 for Medicaid. Just to make up the current deficit, somebody is going to have to pay an additional $100 in tax for every man, woman and child in MS. Since 780,000 are getting the Medicaid, I doubt they will pay much of that. Then there are all of the infants, children and elderly who don't work and who pay little or no taxes. So my guess is that the average working taxpayer will have to cough up an additional $300-400 each. In addition to what they already pay to fund Medicaid both in state and federal tax dollars. Are y'all ready for that? It can be a cigarette tax or an income tax or borrowed money, but one way or another some private citizen has to pay it.

And once we have raised the tax, then where are we? Over my lifetime, I have seen federal/state government crisis after crisis. Usually, it results in some sort of tax increase. What ever the amount of the tax increase, the government just quickly finds a way to spend it and borrow some more on top of that, leading to the next crisis. It is a never ending cycle. For example, my property tax has gone up significantly every year for the last three or four years. Sometimes hundreds of dollars a year. It's gone up on both house and autos. More than half of that tax is earmarked for the schools. Yet every year that goes by, all I hear on the news is the financial mess our schools are in, and how taxes may have to go up again. Was it in Huston where they recently had the little taxpayer revolt, refusing by a large margin a bond issue for the schools? No amount is ever enough. Solving the problem now just leads to more demands later, every time. In the meantime, you read about government largess as they give millions of dollars each to certain large farmers right here in MS. Every year. Some of these farms have received $10,000,000 in the last few years. check this out:
www.ewg.org/farm/top_recips.php?fips=28000&progcode=total
It can be good to be on the approved government list of which citizens ( or even non-citizens ) they will give money to, once they have taken it from other citizens. It is not always the destitute.

This Medicaid thing is just a preview of what is coming in SS. Though many deny it of course. As we boomers retire, the workers to retiree ratio will skyrocket, though many deny it. In 1940, there were 42 workers per retiree. The ratio today is down to 3-to-1, and it'll be 2-to-1 before today's 20-year-olds are eligible for Early Birds. ( www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1349011/posts ) It will be interesting to see what kinds of tax raises will be required by that situation.

OK, go ahead and shoot me. I've asked my questions, and now I'll get off of my soapbox and await the answers.

[Magnolia]

Concerning Medicaid, this state is stupid. Some of our kids are on Medicaid We made the call trying to get their kids on CHIPS (the one you pay for). Medicaid said they couldn't change them over. How stupid is that? We told the state we would willingly pay for something and the state turned us down.

[granny2young]

I have said in numerous places that 1 in 4 Medicaid receiptiants is the problem of the current Medicaid crisis. Will more money fix this? Absolutely not. It will patch a hole in the bucket, but at the current rate will be broke again soon. Pretty soon places to borrow money from will be broke too. They are robbing Peter to pay Paul so to speak. It's a vicious cycle that is doomed to repeat itself until the problem is fixed; that being 1 in 4 people relying on Medicaid for insurance coverage. I saw figures that only 20% of those people are elderly and/or disabled. The rest of the 80% are able bodied middle-aged people who use Medicaid because it is cheaper and they get to pocket their money and don't have to pay high insurance premiums. That is where the problem lies. We have numerous programs in MS, I say use them to help the Medicaid crisis. Programs like Fed Pell grants, JAPA program, etc. Get these 80% off the program and help them get a good job and teach them a better way of living, and by all means give the best of care to the 20% of our elderly and disabled.

[wittzo]

Another bad thing is that hospitals don't tend to negotitiate with the state like they do with insurance companies. They jack up their rates for the services that Medicaid does pay for to make up for stuff Medicaid doesn't cover. It's like ER services charging more to make up for the deadbeats that don't pay.

One third of my wages went to pay for Walmart insurance, my ex-wife was contract labor, Walmart had high deductibles as it was, we needed Medicaid to help us pay our bills. One of our sons went straight into Le Bon Heur and then NMMC's intensive care for a month at $10k a day. There's no way we could have afforded to pay 20% of that.

The majority of the population is working poor, welcome to Mississippi! ;D

[BillyBob]

Magnolia said:

Concerning Medicaid, this state is stupid. Some of our kids are on Medicaid We made the call trying to get their kids on CHIPS (the one you pay for). Medicaid said they couldn't change them over. How stupid is that? We told the state we would willingly pay for something and the state turned us down.

This sort of thing is probably related to the types of corruption that naturally develop in all government programs. I would think that if you are a Medicaid bureaucrat, you have an incentive to make sure the number of people on Medicaid goes up, not down. Decreasing the rolls could lead to a decrease in your budget. Which could lead to a decrease in your power and pay check. Hence the natural self survival tendency of all government programs, once established, to grow and grow and grow. Has anybody ever heard of a government program ever getting smaller and going away? No, that would be quite rare, unless replaced by yet another larger program.

Remember when Barbour tried to remove about 65,000 from the Medicaid rolls, and what a stink that caused. Now I realize that was only a very small part of the total of 780,000 who are on it. Was he defeated on that? I can't remember. But now the choices are to 1: reduce the number of folks getting Medicaid 2: reduce benefits 3: raise taxes/ borrow and increase the debt.

The first two would lead to a decrease in the size of the beurearacy of MS Medicaid. Lets see which one actually happens.

[taxed]

My wife works with a lady that has three children on medicaid. Yet, she has these three children enrolled in a private school. The lady makes a well above average salary and has a husband that makes a well above average salary, too. I don't understand how these people get on the program. Do they lie? My wife and I have children and make a comparable salary to this couple and we got laughed at trying to qualify for CHIPS.

I do know that almost everytime I go to the drugstore to pick up my $300 dollars of drugs I see very able bodied people picking up their $3 per prescriptions. The Bible says to give to widows and orphans, but it also says if you don't work - you don't eat. I truly believe if we could get the deadbeats off of the system there would be plenty to go around.

Jackson, are you listening?