Reply #55: Medicaid is rife with problems for poor people. It's not some magic bullet.

[Political Heretic]

Medicaid has so many problems for poor people, I don't even know where to begin at 2:41am. I get so sick of middle class folks unaquainted with any sort of true and sustained poverty saying "poor people are fine! They get medicaid!"

Quality of care under medicaid lags behind everything else. Coverage and criteria for eligibility vary from state to state. Number of accessible providers serving medicaid patients is limited, in some states severely so. Other forms of assistance can make you ineligible for medicaid, so that if you get one leg up from once source, you lose health insurance - its part of the vicious cycle of our "assistance" programs with eligibility requirements that end up keeping people trapped in a cycle of poverty.

About the time they start to rise above the hole, they are deemed to have "too much" for some program and lose benefits, putting them right back into poverty again.

This is not just abstract talk for me - I've lived through this myself AND watched it happen to my father.