And getting back to the original subject, the turn this thread has taken is the sort of debate that should have been inspired by Graeme Frost. If Malkin and Limbaugh and Powerline and Steyn and all the others had used the Frost family example as a basis for saying the sorts of things that Doors and Weirddave are saying here, rather than going after the Frost family itself like a pack of wild dogs (it’s sad that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of wild dogs*), then there would have been no need for the OP here.
I disagree with what Doors and Weirddave are saying here, but they’re engaging in the right debate.
Frankly, I wonder how much we could expand health coverage for poor people if we could just get the fraud out of Medicaid and SCHIP programs.
A very brief perusal of fraud cases in these systems has been quite an eye opener - the fraud amounts to billions of dollars a year just in New York State alone.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but just doing that wouldn’t expand health coverage, right? It would free up dollars, but there still has to be a mechanism in place to extend health coverage to children presently without it.
What the fuck is wrong with American media that this woman has any audience larger than that of a Facebook page? She basically issued a fatwah against the Frost family. She might as well have broadcast it from a cave. And yet, sometime soon, she’ll be back on Fox as if that’s something mature human beings do.
No, a large percentage of uninsured kids are eligible for SCHIP or Medicaid but are not signed up. In fact, the Bush Administration recently enacted rules to force states to sign up low-income kids eligible but not using SCHIP before expanding their programs to the middle class.
Well, I think most people wouldn’t object to funding well-run programs, and even expanding them. I certainly wouldn’t. But I do think people would object to programs that are both large and overrun with fraud.
New York State has 7% of the country’s population, but spends 14% of our Medicaid funds. They spend as much as Florida and California combined on a population a third as large. This generosity fuels massive fraud and waste - like I said, it adds up to billions of dollars. There is no way that any expansion of this program should be justified at all. Period.
In fact, it should be reformed so that better results are delivered for far less money.
Now, I don’t see this sort of issue as being particularly ideological, frankly. I don’t think anyone can justify New York’s Medicaid program spending or administration by any defensible measure. And as was noted above, SCHIP expansion was advocated by both parties - it is the size of the expansion that is being debated.
It is clear that Democrats have a larger motive in mind - government run health care. And I would be better inclined to listen to that debate if things like that Medicaid fraud (which, again, nobody likes or can defend) were cleared up.
I’m not happy with the current system - I was laid off some months ago, and COBRA payments for a couple of months were tough to make. We even contemplated putting the kids on Virginia’s version of SCHIP. So I am open to all sorts of suggestions, and I favor most ones that delink health coverage from work.
But this fraud disturbs me - it ought to disturb everyone. And using the SCHIP issue to sneak in government run health coverage for more people without cleaning these systems up first disturbs me as well.
Before it disturbs me, I have to know it exists. (Pardon me for doubting you, but your track record on unsupported factual assertions is pretty poor. If you clean up your act, maybe someday I won’t have to ask for a cite each time you make an assertion like this.)
The next thing I’d have to ask is, why are you lumping Medicaid and SCHIP together? Are they administered as a unit? Or has it been documented that both programs share similar administrative problems and prevalence of fraud? I’d need a reason why Medicaid fraud should be a reason against SCHIP expansion.
I’m all for investigating fraud, and finding ways to minimize its recurrence. It’s hard to be ‘disturbed’ anymore about fraud, though, unless it’s on a scale much bigger than other recent uninvestigated instances of wasted or lost or disappeared Federal money that I used to be ‘disturbed’ about, but that now have receded to a dull ache since it’s clear nothing is being done about them, nor will anything be done about them for at least another 15.3 months.
No, my son is no more deserving than any other child. However, by increasing the income threshhold you open up the possibility that someone who can capably provide will place that burden on the people. If we’re going to administer a program that pegs to income, shouldn’t we do it on the same basis as we do income tax? The people most able to bear the burden bear a larger percentage of it? Or is that an appalling concept to you, too? Yet that’s the society we have, and I see the potential for abuse. I am doing nothing more than pointing that out.
Incidentally, it gives me no small amount of shame that I have to enroll my son in SCHIP. You cannot even begin to fathom how much I want to be able to say that my son is no longer eligible.
In most states they are administered together to some degree. Even if SCHIP money didn’t go to fund explicit expansion of Medicaid, as was done in many states, it set up programs typically run by administrators that also had Medicaid oversight.
For instance, in New York State, the Child Health Plus (SCHIP) program is run by the state Department of Health, which also runs Medicaid. And there is no reason to suppose the program is immune to fraud if run by that crowd.
Here’s a tipline run by the Nassau County Executive. He explicitly mentions SCHIP as a program affected by fraud, and also mentions Medicaid as being ripped off by fraud to the tune of 10-40% every year, a figure impossible to pin down to precision without cracking down on the fraud far more than anyone has done to now.
I was asking Mhendo what his point was, not what the Frost kid’s point was. He was waxing eloquent about SCHIP programs being needed to help some kids and my point was that they already are available, why expand them?
Shame on you Dave, that’s no way to feel in the land of the free benefits and the home of the enslaved. Personal responsibility is such a quaint, outdated concept. Go on, have a dozen more children, it’s your right and you can depend on the government to take excellent care of them, and you, forever and ever and ever and ever. Have some Soma.
Is your emotional well-being really more important than the health of your child?? I hope that’s not true, sir, because that would be viciously immoral.
We’re way behind the curve regarding universal healthcare anyway. It’s the way of the future, whether you like it or not, and the only reason American hasn’t accepted it yet is because of private corporations (HMO’s, etc.) who profit from our suffering.