Rationing by red tape

One of the worst features of our absurd Rube Goldberg non-system of Medicine is that it buries people in paperwork in order to get the benefits they ' re entitled to. When my mother went into a nursing home, I assumed I could complete the application to get her onto Medicaid myself, but it turned out that even for a guy with a Ph.D. in Social Policy who was a full-time professor of health services, policy and practice, it was impossible. I had to hire a lawyer, and we have to pay the lawyer every year to do the required re-determination. And by the way, the only entity that ' s ultimately paying my mother ' s lawyer is the state of Connecticut, because they get all her money and the lawyer ' s fee just come out of it.Every Medicaid beneficiary has to go through redetermination every year, or rather they did until the requirement was temporarily suspended during the Covid-19 pandemic. But now it ' s been reinstated andI expect you can imagine the snarls, FUBARS and SNAFUS that are happening all over the country. Most people who properly lose Medicaid will be able to get insurance through the ACA, but they ' re going to face a coverage gap until they can get that figured out. And people who are improperly denied -- and there will be a lot of them -- will have to appeal if they are able to. Obviously most people who are Medicaid eligible can ' t afford lawyers, and if they can ' t manage to do what I couldn ' t do, and pull together the required piles of paperwork, they ' re out...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs