Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.
The tag 'Medicaid Expansion' is associated with 2 posts.

Guess What? Grandma is Moving In. She’s Got Medical Bills. Maybe to Share. It’s Medicaid Brought to You by Kochcare.

Is kick­ing senior cit­i­zens out of nurs­ing homes good pol­i­tics? That’s a ques­tion GOP ask­ing itself these days. One of many ques­tions relat­ed to the pol­i­tics of health care. Although not many are ask­ing it since the pub­lic large­ly has no idea the ques­tion is being asked at all as recent polls show. With the Sen­ate’s ver­sion of ‘Trump­care’ final­ly released to the pub­lic, we’re now learn­ing that, yes, the GOP appears to think kick­ing seniors out their nurs­ing homes is good pol­i­tics. Because trans­fer­ring Med­ic­aid costs to states and indi­vid­u­als has been a key GOP goal of Trump­care’s con­gres­sion­al authors the entire time and nurs­ing homes are paid for by Med­ic­aid for the vast major­i­ty of peo­ple. So in addi­tion to the many pro­found moral ques­tions raised by the GOP’s health care ‘reform’ plans, a grow­ing num­ber of pro­found polit­i­cal ques­tions are being raised the more we learn about Trump­care as it takes form. Includ­ing whether or not putting nurs­ing home cov­er­age on a fis­cal death spi­ral makes for good pol­i­tics. Granny would prob­a­bly say ‘no’, but she’s got com­pe­ti­tion.


Killing Granny: The GOP’s “One Size Fits All” Death Panel for Health Care

Change is com­ing to Wash­ing­ton DC. Most­ly hor­ri­ble changes. But as we’ll see in this post, there is one very sig­nif­i­cant and pos­i­tive change com­ing as a con­se­quence of the uni­fied GOP con­trol of the White House and Con­gress: GOP is actu­al­ly going to start get­ting the blame it deserves for all the dam­age its pro-oli­garch/an­ti-every­one-else agen­da rou­tine­ly inflicts upon the Amer­i­can peo­ple. Pol­i­tics can be frus­trat­ing for a myr­i­ad of rea­sons, but one of the biggest sources of frus­tra­tion is the cloud of per­pet­u­al obfus­ca­tion and con­fu­sion that tends to per­me­ate the polit­i­cal dis­course and col­lec­tive under­stand­ing of what’s actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing, why it’s hap­pen­ing, and who should be reward­ed or blamed for it. But for the next cou­ple of years, at a min­i­mum, it’s going to be very clear who to blame for the dam­age DC is about to unleash, and it’s not just going to be Don­ald Trump. And when it comes to health care “reform” (pri­va­ti­za­tion) that the GOP is about to impose upon the pop­u­lace, that blame is about to get dan­ger­ous­ly dif­fu­sive for state leg­is­la­tures and gov­er­nor­ships because the Health Care Aus­ter­i­ty Hot Pota­to is about to get tossed in their laps over and over. Indef­i­nite­ly. And since the GOP con­trols almost all state leg­is­la­tures and gov­er­nor­ships at the moment they won’t be able to pre­vent them­selves from slash­ing these pro­grams. So with the com­ing block grant­i­ng of first Med­ic­aid and then Medicare (or maybe both togeth­er), the pol­i­tics of health care is about to get weird. And trag­ic because the GOP won’t be able to help itself with all the aus­ter­i­ty