...enter consider it to be their main source of health care.” The danger of limited accessibility to women’s health and other general health services through a cut in funding is analogous to the current situation of Americans on Medicaid, who theoretically have health insurance due to their low incomes but are unable to find any specialist willing to see them. Budgetary cuts to the Medicaid program induced abysmally low rates of reimbursement joint...
...te Dr. Ron Paul implied he would allow a hypothetical 30-year-old man in a coma and without healthcare to die. The majority of the electorate, however, finds such sentiments callous. Paul replied, “I practiced medicine before Medicaid existed. …The churches took care of it. … I never turned anybody away who needed care.” Churches are charitable, but they are not insurance companies, and they have neither the means nor capacity to effectively pay...
...ugh stimulus spending in response to the current recession has influenced this potentially disastrous trajectory, the main determinants of the unsustainable path are entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The GAO states that “absent changes to federal entitlement programs, spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and interest on the federal debt will account for an ever-growing share of the economy.” To...
...ered by insurance. But Finkelstein has found little evidence that people actually behave this way. Instead, most instances of moral hazard seem to come after one is already sick. A groundbreaking randomized study of Oregonian Medicaid recipients showed that instead of behaving more riskily, patients’ use for services went up when they were covered by insurance regardless of how sick or healthy they were. Needless to say, this costs the system mon...
...ative thought. Burke, who valued slow and measured incremental change to society’s institutions and a general belief in the power of tradition and habit, would have likely, in my opinion, supported the gradualism of expanding Medicaid rather than the libertarian radicalism of Paul Ryan’s alternative health voucher proposal. For better or worse, social welfare programs like Medicare and Medicaid have become American “tradition and habit,” and our...
...g greater emphasis on unemployment insurance and old age benefits. Consequently, the Social Security Act passed without including health insurance. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt through Bill Clinton brought us Medicare and Medicaid, the rise of a “health maintenance organization” (HMO) system, and other revisions, but healthcare still fails to cover all who need it. The healthcare crisis has come to a head in the twenty-first century, with the...
...Nate Silver of the New York Times observed that Ryan gave Romney’s polling numbers a smaller boost than the average vice-presidential selection. Additionally, there are other aspects of Ryan’s plan (such as the rapid cuts to Medicaid services) which will likely become more contentious as Election Day nears. Realities of the Electoral College make it unlikely that Romney or Ryan will take office next January. However, Ryan’s vice-presidential nomi...
...of Americans is certainly unpopular. Worse yet for the president, the Obamatax (as conservatives have now branded it) will most likely hurt the middle class: the rich already have health insurance and the poor are covered by Medicaid. One of Obama’s biggest 2008 campaign promises was that he would not raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 per year, but the Obamatax clearly and flagrantly violates this core promise. The president still...
...inuously refuse to entertain prospects of reducing discretionary spending, for fear of it targets the middle class. In short, Republicans still don’t want to raise taxes, and instead, are favoring cuts to social programs like Medicaid, and food stamps. Democrats, including the Mr. Prez himself, are pushing a two-pronged approach aimed simultaneously at both revenue increases and spending cuts. Despite the White House’s (debatably hyperbolic) for...
...ly be done to deal with out budget woes? What is the one aspect of our deficit that everyone in Washington knows to be the problem? The one answer to this question is the entitlement programs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Of the roughly $47 trillion dollars that the Congressional Budget Office predicted the United States will spend between 2013 and 2024, approximately $24 trillion dollars, over 50%, of that will be spent on these en...
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