Women Subjected to Medicaid’s Sub-Standard Care
During National Women’s Health Week, the Administration is making an attempt to promote Obamacare’s effects on women’s health. However, one of the biggest effects the law will have on women’s health is its massive expansion of the highly flawed Medicaid program. As of 2007, nearly 70 percent of Medicaid beneficiaries – ranging from women of child-bearing age to elderly seniors receiving long-term care – were female. That’s a total of more than 41 million women receiving Medicaid benefits.
The problem is that, for these 41 million women, a Medicaid card doesn’t ensure access to care – let alone quality care:
- Numerous studies have documented that in many cases, outcomes for patients on Medicaid are worse than those with no insurance at all.
- Medicaid patients themselves don’t believe the program constitutes a legitimate benefit. For instance, one struggling mother told the Wall Street Journal in 2007, “You feel so helpless thinking, something’s wrong with this child and I can’t even get her into a doctor….When we had real insurance, we could call and come in at the drop of a hat.” That’s far from a ringing endorsement of the Medicaid program from one mother struggling to take care of her family.
- The program’s dysfunctional culture “clearly condones gross underperformance” at both the state and federal levels – so said a caseworker for Deamonte Driver, the Maryland boy who died from a tooth infection in 2007 because he could not access care under the state’s Medicaid program.
- The Medicaid program is so bad that not a single Democrat voted to place themselves in the program when given an opportunity to do so back in 2010.
Worse yet, Obamacare will expand Medicaid – without reforming the program. According to the Administration’s own actuary, Obamacare will add nearly 26 million more individuals to this broken program. At a time when states are struggling under the weight of budget deficits totaling a collective $175 billion, Obamacare is imposing new unfunded mandates of at least $118 billion. And Obamacare precludes states from taking many types of actions that would modernize the program – and crack down on fraud – because of the new federal requirements being imposed.
Democrats have spent the last several weeks making politically-motivated claims about a supposed Republican “war on women.” Some may argue that, before those individuals get carried away with their own self-righteousness, they take the time to contemplate the Medicaid ghetto into which they have consigned more than 41 million women – to say nothing of the millions more who will be subjected to Medicaid “care” under the 2700-page health care law.