As the financial crisis began cascading down to the state government level a couple years ago, one state after another slashed medical coverage for the indigent.
Eye tests, dental coverage, psychological services, more than a minimum number of x-rays in a given year … pretty much anything not mandated by federal Medicaid parameters began to go the way of the dodo.
A year later, despite Congress having recently passed the most significant healthcare reform since the creation of Medicare, the state level cuts have only gotten worse. California is considering ending anti-asthma programmes, scaling back cancer screenings, and ending Medi-Cal coverage for tens of thousands of recently arrived legal immigrants. Like many other states, it's also limiting the number of poor kids eligible for the state's healthy kids programme. Michigan eliminated dental and podiatric services for the poor. Around the country, stories have begun cropping up of hospitals, fearful that they won't be reimbursed by state and federal agencies, no longer providing dialysis to the indigent. The result? A rash of expensive emergency room visits from extremely sick kidney patients.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/mar/29/healthcare-universal-poor
Posted by:
Christian Lopez
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