Posts
The big battle in Congress is the Democrats trying to expand the SCHIP (State Children's Health Insurance Program) program. Basically this is the program that gets healthcare for kids of families making too much to get onto the Medicaid program. The problem is that the Democrats are trying REALLY hard to expand this even to families of four who make over $80,000 a year. I used to think that those people accusing the Democrats of using this as a covert method to get a national healthcare system were nuts. Not anymore. I recently saw a news talk show where a big Democratic consultant pawned this off as a good thing for kids but started to smirk when the moderator called it for what it was. What is so bad about this? I get that we need a better system. Making everyone a Medicaid patient, however, is not the answer. For those not in the know, Medicaid pays squat. A recent Wall Street Journal article by Vanessa Furhmans nicely pointed out that almost half of all doctors won’t see a Medicaid patient because it ends up costing him or her money to do so. The ones that see Medicaid patients keep their quota to a small level and basically call it charity care. You want to expand SCHIP and Medicaid? Fine. You just better reimburse better and that means a lot more taxes. If you don’t increase the reimbursement, these patients will still have no doctor to see.
