American families nationwide are already seriously struggling to pay their health insurance premiums and medical bills. To hear they might now be picking up the health care tab for their far-flung neighbors could make them sicker than they already feel.
California Gov. Jerry Brown just unveiled his new budget for 2017 — and in it is $102.6 billion in spending for Medi-Cal, the health care program for people with low incomes.
[lz_ndn video=31796512]
Here is the problem: Brown isn’t at all taking into account President-Elect Donald Trump’s promise to repeal and replace Obamacare. And most of the funding would come from the federal government.
California itself, according to the Los Angeles Times, would face a $1.8 billion budget increase for Medi-Cal in the new fiscal year. The program would go from enrolling around 3 million Californians to 4.1 million.
[lz_third_party align=center includes=https://twitter.com/cmaphysicians/status/816388695976595456]
Brown gave no contingency plans should Obamacare be repealed, other than to say it would be painful. A repeal of the ACA could cost the Golden State alone roughly $16 billion and cause chaos within its health care system.
“There is no sort of California fix for a cut of this size,” Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California, a statewide health care consumer advocacy coalition, told Capital Public Radio.
“Instead of improving Medicaid and getting people out of poverty and giving them choice, they agree with expanding the definition of poverty to put more people on an unsustainable failing system,” said one physician.
“A large part of the problem with the Affordable Care Act is that it’s like a bunch of people sitting down at dinner and you tell everyone to order what they want because everyone else will pay for it,” said Dr. Robert Graboyes, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia.
The ACA, said Graboyes, is a financially unstable piece of legislation and always has been.
“The cracks are showing big time at this point,” he told LifeZette. “You’ve got large chunks of it that are failing or have failed — the co-ops, the exchanges, the insurance premiums that are going up, the cutting down on coverage by narrowing networks or by raising deductibles. The simple fact is, the law was always a re-distributive law. That’s the heart of it.”
There are already challenges with California’s Medicaid expansion system. Brown announced this week, along with everything else, that a program established to streamline health services for seniors and low-income families through Medi-Cal was being canceled. It’s a move that will leave California counties footing a $622.6 million bill as of this summer.
Related: Fasten Your Seatbelt for the Health Care Ride
“For all of their complaining and whining and wanting to secede and move away from everyone, it’s just striking how increasingly dependent they [the state of California] have become on the rest of the nation subsidizing them,” said Kris Held, M.D., a Texas-based board certified ophthalmologist and ophthalmic surgeon. Held is also a founder and co-director of American Doctors 4 Truth, a physicians group dedicated to health care reform.
[lz_third_party align=center includes=https://twitter.com/latimes/status/819820158973841408]
She can’t imagine that taxpayers in California could sustain the level of funding needed for Medi-Cal and believes it all speaks to the need for Medicaid reform.
“Most of the time, you get about $.40 on the dollar worth of value [from Medicaid], and I would venture to say it’s even worse in California,” Held noted. “When you know that Medicaid has poor outcomes for the amount of money they spend — instead of improving Medicaid and getting people out of poverty and giving them choice, they agree with expanding the definition of poverty to put more people on an unsustainable failing system with exorbitant costs and horrific outcomes.”
“It’s not surprising — and it’s unsustainable,” said Held.
Join the Discussion
Comments are currently closed.