Policy Article: ObamaCare Medicaid Expansion
People usually associate health problems with low income or even homelessness. Though, serious diseases, inability to work in order to pay the hospital bills, and to afford the rent accelerate the fall from the social ladder, making a comparatively poor person homeless, ill, and penniless.
The problem is not new for the United States, but it still does not lose its urgency. Millions of people do not have medical insurance, because they simply can not afford it and gain less than 138 percent of the federal poverty level (ObamaCare Facts, n.d.). One of the latest reforms that were undertaken in the health insurance sphere is ObamaCare Medicaid Expansion, that supposes to give homeless and those whose income is near the poverty threshold an opportunity to apply for health insurance. However, the situation concerning Medicaid costs in the context of ObamaCare initiative is dubious, which is analyzed in the article Medicaid enrollment under ObamaCare soars, raising cost concerns (Weber, 2015).
The situation concerning this policy can be understood from different perspectives. A patient with low income and an insurance agent perceive it in opposite ways. In fact, Medicaid is the social program and it is the sign that the community is developed enough to care for those, who can not do it by themselves. The perspective of a Medicaid patient is the most appealing to me, because I consider such programs to be obligatory in the societies that do not live according the laws of the jungle, where the strongest survives.
The idea that everyone was surprised when many people decided to use their right to participate in the ObamaCare program is among the key issues in the article. The officials could not even imagine that there are so many people who can not allow themselves to pay for the normal health insurance. Private insurance companies and Pro Profit Hospitals are the key stakeholders in the case of gratuitous medical help. Too many people have applied for the insurance on the basis of the federal program, and as the result the states are not able to cover the medical expanses to the hospitals. It is necessary to remember that Medicaid is financed from the federal budget, and the extra money that are used to cure the poorest Americans could have been used on public education. This issue is a potentially dangerous one, that provokes public negative reactions in the times of socioeconomic crises.
The costs for the insurance raise, the artificial problems are created by the state government and courts, and the tendency to quit the program or all least to minimize the financing is evident. Several states that wanted to continue the expansion of the Medicaid program faced numerous negative reactions from the side of officials and insurance agencies. In addition, they need more money to cover the expanses on Medicaid, but do know where to find it. They can redistribute the state budget in the way that health care for the poorest citizens will use the money that was initially taken to help children. It is possible to assume that if the ideas about more useful expanses of the state budget will continue in mass media, average Americans will also change neutral attitude to the program to the negative one.
The need to pay for everything is the integral part of the American culture. Being poor, and which is even worse, being poor and ill, is often perceived as the result of the person’s idleness. The only positive issue is that the nurses do not usually suffer from such prejudice, and help people regardless their income or source of health insurance, which is the best they can do.
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