The government shutdown threatens to give dead people Medicaid benefits. Yes, you read that correctly. The radical and partisan proposal to reopen the government insists on repealing the provisions of the “Working Families Tax Cut” legislation to ensure that the dollars, doctors, and care are diverted to the people most in need: the recently deceased.
We’re being facetious, but you get the point. The radical Left was so desperate to fulfill its base’s wishes in giving healthcare to illegal immigrants that Democrats proposed repealing the full suite of pro-patient reforms in the WFTC bill, including the very commonsense measure of ensuring that states do not get ongoing federal funding for those no longer alive. The Department of Government Efficiency found 9.9 million Americans when investigating the number of deceased people still on Social Security’s database. States should do the same for Medicaid, ensuring that every dollar available goes to the most vulnerable Americans and is not lost to waste, fraud, and abuse.
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But it doesn’t end there. In their push to spend money on illegal immigrant healthcare, Democrats also repealed the groundbreaking Rural Health Transformation Fund. This fund, administered by the Department of Health and Human Services, makes a $50 billion capital investment into rural communities where there are roughly 30 doctors per 100,000 patients. Compare this with urban communities, which have 263 doctors per 100,000 patients. It is not America First to rob rural communities of life-saving funding in order to reopen the California loophole, using Medicaid to pay for the healthcare of illegal immigrants in the state.
Democrats’ “America last” bill also puts illegal immigrants ahead of the disabled, the original beneficiaries of Medicaid. In order to pay for illegal immigrant healthcare, they reverse the moratorium on implementing the unlawful nursing home staffing rule that threatened closures for hundreds of nursing home facilities. It doesn’t stop there. They remove waivers passed in the Working Families Tax Cut to allow Medicaid dollars to help disabled individuals stay in their homes longer. This has been a bipartisan effort, which now radicals are threatening to repeal in order to repurpose the money for illegal immigrants’ healthcare.
Other bipartisan, patient-first reforms are threatened in this funding bill — things such as direct primary care, where patients can use their health savings accounts to pay for a $75 per month subscription to round-the-clock access to a primary care doctor. This idea radically shifts patients’ dollars away from the middlemen who control access to doctors and restores the doctor-patient relationship, something desperately needed to make Americans healthy again. In fact, early evidence shows positive indications that direct primary care can manage chronic diseases better than traditional models, reduce emergency room visits, decrease hospitalizations, and have overall better clinical outcomes. And as a bonus, it’s cheaper than traditional insurance models. This is a huge win for patients, but the radical Left wants to reverse it to give federal Medicaid dollars to illegal immigrants.
Another pro-patient win reversed in their partisan funding proposal is the expansion of health savings accounts to patients in catastrophic and bronze Obamacare plans. These patients are ineligible for HSAs because these plans are not considered “high deductible” — despite average individual deductibles ranging from $7,258 to $9,450 — quadruple the costs of a normal “high-deductible” plan. The Working Families Tax Cut recognizes the unfairness to patients enrolled in bronze and catastrophic plans and has reclassified them as high-deductible health plans, allowing those enrolled to access HSAs for the first time ever — giving them more options to defray high health costs.
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As if that wasn’t enough, it also reversed the pro-patient wins that allow 42% of Americans with high-deductible health plans to use low-cost telehealth before hitting their deductible. The proposed spending bill raises these costs again, reversing this popular, pro-patient win.
Radicals on the Left have no intention of making Americans healthy again, and their spending bill reflects it. Their bill gives money to illegal immigrants and imposes costs on the American patient and the American taxpayer. President Donald Trump has been working to put American patients first and to make healthcare more affordable. The pro-patient wins in the Working Families Tax Cut legislation are just the beginning of this effort to make America healthy again, but they are on the chopping block.
Bobby Jindal (@BobbyJindal) was the governor of Louisiana from 2008-2016 and a candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Hannah Anderson is director of healthy America policy and senior director of policy at America First Policy Institute.
