The projections from the health consulting firm Avalere come as states undertake a sweeping reevaluation of the 94 million people enrolled in Medicaid, government’s health insurance for the neediest Americans. A host of problems have surfaced across the country, including hourslong phone wait times in Florida, confusing government forms in Arkansas, and children wrongly dropped from coverage in Texas.
“Those people were destined to fail,” said Trevor Hawkins, an attorney for Legal Aid of Arkansas.
Hawkins helped hundreds of people navigate their Medicaid eligibility in Arkansas, as state officials worked to “swiftly disenroll” about 420,000 people in six months’ time. He raised problems with Arkansas’ process — like forms that wrongly told people they needed to reapply for Medicaid, instead of simply renew it — with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The arguments are pretty spot on (with plenty of exceptions, e.g. efforts to privatize healthcare in each country; but we’re generalizing here), not so much the conclusion:
Unsustainable: US healthcare for profit. Evidence: Most expensive healthcare in the world with average or worse results.
Sustainable: Universal healthcare for everyone. Evidence: Every other country in North America, Europe, Australia, parts of Africa and South America.
I meant “sustain” in a political sense. We’re not going to be able to expand a system that Republicans are successfully destroying, nor are we going to be able to enact something better. Things are just gonna keep getting worse in red states until they’ve had enough (which may be never). The best we can do at the federal level right now is to prevent Republicans from sabotaging blue states.