Newly elected Republicans are already coming up with new and innovative ways to screw the poor, elderly, and people with disabilities. Texas Republicans, who now enjoy a supermajority in the state legislature, have become enamored with the idea of withdrawing from the Medicaid program. Republicans seem to think that private insurers can do a much better job of providing care to a high-cost population for a much lower sticker price. To call the idea insane is being too kind to the fanatic ideologues who thought this up. No state has the resources to provide adequate health care to this population. Any effort to shoehorn them into the private market without adequate funding would be disastrous, resulting in worse health care for the poor and disabled while raising the cost of health care for everyone else.
States have legitimate gripes about the amount of resources they must devote to Medicaid, but the solution isn’t to punish the people served by the program. Saner voices will probably prevail in this debate, but the fact that such draconian measures are already being openly discussed by lawmakers should be very worrying to health care advocates.
