Republicans use the term “class warfare” when the President asks the top 1 percent to pay its fair share. Rep. Paul Ryan said “class warfare makes for great politics but rotten economics,” and I, for one, agree. However, if you really want to see class warfare and how it makes for poor economics, look no further then the proposed $554.4 million cut to Medicaid.
I talked to Jack Waters, executive director of the Kenosha Community Health Center – and my dad – about the cuts. His opinion was that “the ultimate effect of these cuts is that people who may have gained access to care will no longer have it. This really challenges us to ask the question: Who are the most vulnerable? And who are we most committed to providing care to”?
It appears we are most committed to the elderly. Medicaid is split up into two categories, long-term and short-term care. This cut will not effect the two-thirds of spending that goes toward long-term care for the elderly. It will effect those receiving short-term, primary care, the most vulnerable people in our society.
That last third of Medicaid recipients will bear the brunt of the $554 million cut. That cut is roughly a fourth of the short-term budget. And who are the most vulnerable to these cuts? Pregnant women, children and childless young adults.
With the cuts, a pregnant woman may now show up to the emergency room in her third trimester, without ever having received prenatal care. Thousands of children who would have been covered now miss a vaccination, regular check-ups and consistent dental care. A 19-year-old from a lower-income family with a high school degree, living alone with no children now loses access to primary care.
Consistent appointments with primary care physicians are the best way to reduce health care costs. Perhaps more than any other problem, health problems are incredibly cheaper to deal with in their initial stages. Allowing a problem to evolve to the point where emergency care is required is completely cost-ineffective.
If the pattern is not becoming clear, ending people’s coverage, while great on paper, falls apart in real life. For some, it fails in the simple idea that targeting the most vulnerable people is a poor way to conduct a government. But the real problem isn’t a moral issue, it’s a logistical one. What happens to all these people now without coverage? They lose access to primary care, and therefore only use the health care system in emergency situations – and emergency rooms are the single most expensive place to see a doctor.
It comes down to saving a dollar today to spend 10 tomorrow, and it comes in a package of targeting the most vulnerable people in our society. The way the cuts are sold to the middle class, as removing the people who mooch off your hard earned dollar, doesn’t hold up on any level. It can hold up on a moral level if you leave those people faceless, as an obscure statistic, and not the millions of young people trying to make it in this world, along with the pregnant, the young and the needy. It has no grounds at all on a fiscal level.
The way to fix rising health care costs is not by removing people from coverage. It is by including them in a refined system that looks for ways to improve service delivery, getting people out of expensive emergency situations and into consistent, cheaper primary care.
This country already knows deep down that we are not callous enough to turn away a person in need of care, but we appear not to grasp that by denying them insurance to receive primary care we guarantee those extreme situations. People get sick, people get hurt, people get pregnant and people have children. That is the most obvious sentence I may ever write, and yet it does not seem to enter into the health care conversations. No time to talk about real people in an accounting equation. No benefit to talk about people in a political ploy.
This is class warfare, and let me put one last face on the people affected. You. No matter who you are, this hurts you. Even if you don’t know a single person who fits the descriptions I have given, we have decided as a country to see anyone who walks into an emergency room. All of us will bear that burden. Bottom line: The Medicaid cuts don’t make economic sense, and since everything in this country is now an accounting equation, that’s my two cents.
John Waters ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in journalism.
