While Nobody’s Watching, Paul Ryan Is Taking A Sledgehammer To Medicaid’s Promise To Seniors

WASHINGTON ― While the debate over Obamacare repeal focuses on insurance subsidies, coverage equity and tax cuts, a far more radical attempt is quietly underway to end the Medicaid program as we know it.

As currently structured, Medicaid guarantees a set of benefits to everybody who qualifies. Most people associate Medicaid with the poor and working class, but historically the program has spent as much or more money on elderly and disabled people who qualify. They use it to pay for things like nursing-home care that Medicare doesn’t cover.

The new version of the program would upend this arrangement. It would devolve Medicaid to the states and reimburse them using a predetermined formula that, as the Congressional Budget Office and other experts have concluded, would not actually keep up with the cost of care. As the federal contribution toward Medicaid eroded over time, states could make up the difference on their own or ― more likely ― they could make cuts in whom or what the program covers. The federal guarantee would be over, and with it, the Medicaid program as we know it. - More, huffingtonpost

While Nobody’s Watching, Paul Ryan Is Taking A Sledgehammer To Medicaid’s Promise To Seniors