Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Let em die in the streets!

It's not the purpose of this blog to comment on President Bush (rats!) but there's a part of his recently proposed budget that's relevant to Michigan and Michigan politics.

When W (or any politician) pledges to balance the budget by cutting Medicaid spending, all he is doing is saying that reimbursements to hospitals and health care providers will be cut. The actual cost of providing care for the poor won't go away, it will just be shifted somewhere else. Either the hospitals go broke or they increase the charges to insured patients, which ends up on the back of employers (or workers) in the form of rising premiums.

Unless the U.S. is willing to let indigent citizens die in the streets, cutting Medicaid to save money is a sham, and whoever proposes it is a fraud.

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