Do You Have a Relative in a Nursing Home?

"Medicaid Cuts May Force Retirees Out of Nursing Homes":

Khue Bui for The New York Times

Medicaid pays for most of the 1.4 million people in nursing homes .... It covers 20 percent of all Americans and 40 percent of poor adults.

On Thursday, Senate Republicans joined their House colleagues in proposing steep cuts to Medicaid, part of the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Conservatives hope to roll back what they see as an expanding and costly entitlement. But little has been said about what would happen to older Americans in nursing homes if the cuts took effect.

Under federal law, state Medicaid programs are required to cover nursing home care. But state officials decide how much to pay facilities, and states under budgetary pressure could decrease the amount they are willing to pay or restrict eligibility for coverage....

Pssst. North Carolina Bosses of the Republican General Assembly ... talking 'bout you, 'bout what you might be up for doing next -- only bigger -- in North Carolina.

“The states are going to make it harder to qualify medically for needing nursing home care,” predicted Toby S. Edelman, a senior policy attorney at the Center for Medicare Advocacy. “They’d have to be more disabled before they qualify for Medicaid assistance.”

Republicans are okay with that. Their philosopher kings have preached against socialism -- government payments to the poor and taxes on everybody to finance it -- as fundamentally unAmerican. Meanwhile, Libertarians are more turned on right now than they've ever been before at the prospect of snuffing Obamacare, saving money, and thinning the herd. Ayn Rand rides again, and Donald Trump is her blind mule!

(There's no contract Donald J. Trump can't break, including the social contract.)

The situation in the small town of Orange, Virginia, is similar to Boone, North Carolina, and a zillion other rural places in this country:

The 150 residents of Dogwood Village [a county nursing home] include former teachers, farmers, doctors, lawyers, stay-at-home parents and health aides — a cross section of this rural county a half-hour northeast of Charlottesville. Many entered old age solidly middle class but turned to Medicaid, which was once thought of as a government program exclusively for the poor, after exhausting their insurance and assets.

We're facing a crisis in medical care masquerading as "reform." The idiot in charge says any damn thing at any damn time and clearly doesn't understand his own words, nor remember he ever spoke them.