Today's Atlanta Journal Constitution has a great breakdown of the plan, including how much it costs, who it will be paid for and more. The plan plans on covering 95 percent of Americans at a cost of 900 billion over 10 years. The plan will not cover illegal immigrants, and hopes to have the states pick up some of the cost.
For our snippet on this story, we go to the New York Times Blogs, writer By David M. Herszenhorn tells us some of the particulars of the plan.
The House legislation, as well as a Senate framework released by Mr. Baucus, calls for raising the income eligibility threshold for Medicaid to 133 percent of the federal poverty level — a figure that for 2009 translates to about $14,400 for an individual.
A big change is that childless adults under age 65 who are now typically excluded from Medicaid will be eligible. So will many parents who now often face tighter restrictions.
Currently, states must offer Medicaid to pregnant women and to children under age 6 from families with income under 133 percent of the poverty level. States must also offer coverage to children age 6 to 18 from families with income below the poverty line.
And though many states have set higher thresholds for children, typically at more than 200 percent of poverty, many parents of these children do not have coverage. Only 11 states cover parents earning more than 133 percent of poverty.
Experts estimate that roughly one-third of Americans who currently lack insurance earn less than 133 percent of the poverty limit — a group of 10 million people who might join Medicare under the proposed new rules.
1 comment:
From your blog it appears Medicaid could be “adjusted” to include more of the Uninsured needy. Interesting. So it would appear congress could just adjust or tweek the eligibility rules for an already existing welfare program and cover the medical care needy multitudes. Why is this not the avenue being sought? This could be easily instigated and still put together tiger teams to go after true waste and abuse in the Medicade and Medicare systems. What cannot be paid for with the waste and abuse savings would have to be paid for with federal funds and probably result in some minor tax hikes. Sounds like an easy fix for a messy problem. As Paul Harvy would say, This is where the rest of the story comes in. Liberals really only give a minor care about the needy, what they want is to topple the big insurance companies and the only way to do that is for public option insurance to eventually compete with the big insurance companies and, because you can’t compete with the guys who make the money, put the big insurance companies out of business. This is why the liberals refuse to get behind anything but the public option. Sounds like a plan, and a sneaky one --- based more on hate for the insurance companies than compassion for the needy.
Post a Comment