Health care likely to get worse under Trump
by Tom Sullivan
Todd Mouw’s in-home care ended abruptly in March. A quadraplegic since a car accident 32 years ago, he required a ventilator to breathe and help feeding himself. Yet he lived at home for decades thanks to medical staff who visited daily to maintain his health and equipment, the Des Moines Register reports:
That care abruptly ended when a for-profit company that Iowa hired last year to manage the state’s Medicaid program announced that some of the staffers who had attended to Mouw all those years weren’t qualified, and it wouldn’t pay for the cost.
As he and his wife Cyndi futilely searched for qualified help, Todd’s health dissipated. He had to leave his home for care, and on July 8 he died at age 53.
While seeking caregivers Amerigroup would approve, Todd sometimes went days without care. He was eventually hospitalized with pneumonia and, although his health improved, he was never able to return home.
“Don’t get me wrong, his death was inevitable,” Cyndi Mouw told the Register. “But I do believe with all my heart this could have been prevented and he would have lived longer.”
Iowa’s government for decades had managed the state’s Medicaid program, which serves more than 568,000 poor or elderly Iowans.
That changed last year when then-Gov. Terry Branstad decided to move the state’s Medicaid management to three private companies, saying health care would improve and the state would save tens of millions of dollars each year. The companies help decide which health procedures Medicaid will pay for.
Three companies — AmeriHealth, UnitedHealthcare and Amerigroup — began managing the program in April 2016. The three companies were paid $1,041 to $3,313 a month for each Medicaid patient they oversaw.
Since then, hundreds of Iowans have logged complaints, many saying the companies have unfairly denied access to care.
Health care concerns transcend party lines. A Kaiser Family Foundation study last month that 56% of Americans believe the Trump administration are trying to make the Affordable Care Act fail. Polling shows Americans by a 7 to 1 margin believe that’s bad. A key finding from their July polling:
The July Kaiser Health Tracking Poll finds a candidate’s position on continuing protections for people with pre-existing health conditions is the top health care campaign issue for voters, among a list of issues provided. This issue cuts across voter demographics with most Democratic voters (74 percent), independent voters (64 percent), and voters living in battleground areas (61 percent), as well as half of Republican voters (49 percent) saying a candidate’s position on continued protections for pre-existing health conditions is either the single most important factor or a very important factor in their 2018 vote.
The Trump administration’s proposing short-term plans that shortcut Obamacare’s minimum care requirements and “are exempt from covering people with pre-existing conditions” contributes to voters’ concerns. Health care was the No. 1 issue in a poll of potential 2018 voters conducted for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal in June. Half of those in the 17 states that have not accepted the Medicaid expansion favor doing so, Kaiser found. Iowa is among the Medicaid expansion states. Medicaid expansion initiatives are on the ballot this fall in Idaho, Nebraska and Utah.
“Things are likely to get worse” under Trump, writes Jonathan Cohn at Huffington Post:
They have passed a tax cut that effectively eliminates the individual mandate penalty. They have slashed funding for enrollment outreach. Now, with this latest regulatory change, they have made it easier for people to purchase ― and then hold onto ― short-term plans that don’t comply with the ACA’s standards.
People struggling with high premiums today will discover short-term plans are a lot cheaper ― and many who opt for that coverage will be just fine. But the buyers who get serious medical problems will face crippling medical bills and in many cases, they won’t know about this exposure until it is too late, because the companies and brokers who sell these plans are notorious for hiding limits and exclusions in the fine print.
Fine print can be worse than the disease. Where’s the cure for that?
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