Excellent “catch” by Edward Morrissey, regarding the continuing Obamacare fiasco. (And he provides a clear definition of the difference between Medicaid and Medicare.)
via Yahoo Finance: The Obamacare ‘Shotgun Wedding’ — Marry or Lose Your Home
….Instead of designing a solution that focused on the half of the 15 percent who needed better options and leaving everyone else alone, Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill insisted on imposing an overhaul of the entire health-insurance industry. This includes, crucially, an unprecedented individual mandate to carry health-insurance coverage. The ACA contains a highly-complex series of subsidies that help working-class Americans pay the now-skyrocketing premiums caused by coverage mandates on insurers, but only down to a certain income level.
Below that point, Americans who do not have employer-based coverage have to accept Medicaid coverage in order to comply with the Obamacare individual mandate, or pay full price for the skyrocketing premiums from private-sector insurers.
People often confuse Medicaid with Medicare, but there is a critical difference between the two programs. Medicare eligibility derives from Social Security contributions, and is a true “entitlement” program. Theoretically, coverage comes as part of the funds paid into the system, although in reality the federal government has to borrow billions of dollars to cover the costs.
Medicaid, on the other hand, is a state-based and federally-subsidized welfare program, one that employs means-testing – which includes ownership of assets as well as income levels. Medicaid programs include conditions that put recipients’ assets remaining after death at risk for seizure to reimburse taxpayers who footed the bill for the recipient’s health care during his/her lifetime.
This was done to prevent fraud, to ensure that limited resources went to the truly needy, and to recapture resources to cover future costs. Until now, though, Medicaid was a voluntary program, and the vast majority of people who entered into it had few assets to risk by signing up.
Here’s where the law of unintended consequences comes into Obamacare. Thanks to the exchange programming, consumers are getting enrolled in Medicaid whether they understand what that means or not, and in much greater numbers than before. (In the first month, nearly 90 percent of all the enrollees in the federal and state exchanges were Medicaid applicants.
Unless they look at the fine print in the paperwork in Washington and other states with similar asset-forfeiture regulations, any assets they own will not pass to their heirs but to the state instead….
Related:
Seattle Times: Expanded Medicaid’s fine print holds surprise: ‘payback’ from estate after death
My grandfather’s assets had to be signed over to the state of North Dakota in the 70s when he needed to be in a nursing home, so this isn’t new. Additionally the feds will be watching any gifts to the family. If any is within 5 years of signing up for Medicaid, the gifts will be considered fraud (as in hiding assets) and they will go after the monies.
I keep hoping that Obama care will come crashing down under the weight of its own incompetence. People are realizing that they’re being stolen from which causing a lot of rage. While all the hoopla about Ocare is going on, dear leader has stated that “income equality” is on his agenda for the rest of his term. Let’s start with his income. The various opinions that “all this is deliberate” or “the fiasco of Obama care is big surprise to the regime,” frankly, I don’t know if it’s deliberate or not. I just want it to fail.
I think the article is being too generous, that this little detail about Medicaid was a mistake. Since the ’08 crash the states have been in need of revenues. This situation is only going to get worse as unfunded state pension and state entitlement obligations get larger with the passage of time. States are going to be looking to get their hands on whatever assets they can get.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/robert-j-samuelson-here-comes-the-spoils-society/2013/09/29/7d751680-2783-11e3-ad0d-b7c8d2a594b9_story.html
I had a thought re. why middle income people keep getting the short end of the stick. What the Democratic Party has been able to do is take advantage of people who are economically able and somewhat successful, but who are politically unaware, and politically weak in terms of standing up for their own interests. I get the impression that they don’t understand what’s happening in politics and fiscal policy, and so are easily fooled by advocacy politics that speaks to their needs, but does not fulfill them. The very party that says they are “fighting” for them is picking their pockets under the banner of “We’re all in this together,” making them feel proud to be giving what wealth they have to an entity that pretends to help their fellow man, but is frittering it away, leaving them crumbs, if that.