Medicaid Hurdles

This lengthy article in the NY Times details the difficulty patients in New York have navigating the maze of Medicaid's paperwork requirements and eligibility rules:

"The program - which consumes more than one-third of the state budget - is vulnerable to fraud and abuse by unscrupulous providers, wasting billions of dollars annually, experts and government officials say. But New York does less than other states to police payments to hospitals, nursing homes and ambulette companies, or to prosecute the guilty.

And yet, life at Morris Heights makes clear how keenly New York scrutinizes ordinary patients trying to get into Medicaid, in the name of ensuring that ineligible people cannot slip through. 'We do a better job than we'd do if we didn't have all of these requirements in place,' said Dennis P. Whalen, executive deputy commissioner of the State Department of Health."

This is a deliberate strategy of course. New York saves itself and the federal government money by making it as a difficult as possible for patients to enroll in the program and keeping the total number of those requiring medical care as low as possible. And don't think New York is the only state that does this. All states have incentive to exclude as many eligible candidates for Medicaid as possible, to keep their costs down. Making a showing of eligibility difficult is the easiest way to exclude patients without incurring any political consequences by making budget cuts.

Overall this is just another example of how our current system of health care in America is failing to serve the needs of our neediest citizens.