Sunday, July 6, 2014

Walker's Health Care Malpractice

When Scott Walker said he was going to do his own thing with the health care exchanges and eschewed federal funding to help expand Medicaid coverage in the state, you just knew he was going to bollox things up, and wow, did he ever:
The White House Council of Economic Advisers' report found that expansion in Wisconsin would mean coverage for an additional 120,000 people by 2016. The number of people facing catastrophic out-of-pocket costs would drop by 5,400 annually and the number of people borrowing to pay medical bills or skipping payments on medical bills would drop by 17,100.

Expansion would lead to 11,200 additional jobs in Wisconsin by 2017 and $2.6 billion in additional federal spending in the state between 2014 and 2016, the report said.
Of course, Walker denies all of this and said that the report was about those other states that didn't expand Medicaid, not Wisconsin.

Yeah, right.

This news comes at the same time that it is being reported that the state is facing a $93 million shortfall. The reason that Walker's administration gave for the shortfall, which more than quadrupled since March, was because there are more poor people applying. Needless to say, the reason for the increase in poor people is because Walkernomics is predictably not working.

Walker's administration is trying to deal with this shortfall in his usual method - delaying, if not outright denying, needed services.  The time that the state is taking in authorizing requests have grown almost as exponentially as the shortfall.  The process time for requests through the state Medicaid system has gone from two months to more than six months.  And many times, those requests end up being denied anyway for the most trivial of reasons.

Failure to create jobs, denying and/or delaying services to people that need them and running up a deficit when federal funding is there for the takings....

Walker's train wreck of a health care system reminds me more than a bit of the wreck Walker caused by shunning high speed rail which would have helped create jobs and bring a lot of much needed funding to the state.

2 comments:

  1. Right on target.

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  2. I am trying to find the report I read in the last few months by a WI blogger, indicating that something like 671 additional WI citizens will die, as the direct result of Walker and the REPUBLICAN majority in this debacle. Run on that platform Democrats. Not a freaking public word on this from any candidates I follow and would likely vote for, who are running on the not Republican ticket, in the send money and vote for me, crowd.

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