The Future is Now… in Mississippi
Step right up, step right up: Mississippi, a state blessed with something like 25% of its population already Medicaid eligible, announced the deepest Medicaid cuts in the nation, including a limitation to no more than five prescriptions (and two non-generics) per month. Not surprisingly, the cause of the cuts is reduced federal funding to the Medicaid program (which, with its sister program Medicare, consumes a cool 1/5 of federal spending) was lobbied for heavily by… Mississippi’s own senator (and former RNC Chairman) Haley Barbour. While this proposal will, of course, screw lots and lots of poor White people, because on balance, it will screw people of color still more, it is good politics in Mississippi.
Well, Mississippi is simply ahead of the rest of us: its state budgetary problems are simply more acute than those of many other states (at least it doesn’t have a Supreme Court Justice who insists on state money being squandered on litigating about stone tablets as in neighboring Alabama.) Anyway… It’s just a matter of time before just about every state has to confront, in a very harsh way, the twin realities of dwindling federal contributions to the Medicaid (and Medicare, to a great extent) programs, and ever rising costs (driven in large part by unfunded federal mandates in such areas as recordkeeping) in running the programs, and especially, rising prescription drug costs.
It continues to amaze me that the standard knee-jerk conservative opposition to national health care (i.e., effectively socialized medicine) is “but we’ll ration care”. Take a good look in Mississippi, boys and girls: what in God’s name do you call limiting extremely sick people to an arbitrary cap of five prescription drugs per month, if not “rationing care”? We’re there. Right now. Only we’re there without sensible programs which just might ensure all Americans of basic health care so that the kind of acute problems that arise later in life (from allowing earlier maladies to be untreated because of, inter alia, poverty precluding seeking proper care) might be alleviated.
My God. As long as screwing the poor (because the poor are… them) is good politics, this sort of thing will continue in other states. Unfortunately, people dropping dead in the streets (or, more likely, overwhelming charity programs, or flowing into states with more generous benefit programs… for now) will be the ultimate resolution.
I guess this is what the President was suggesting when he coined the phrase “prosperity with a purpose.”
July 2nd, 2005 at 10:22 am
Barbour is the Governor of Mississippi, not Senator.
still can’t believe that sack a shit got elected.