EDITORIAL COMMENT
Governor Rick Perry and the newly elected majority of Republican officials in Texas have a great idea – let’s get out of Medicaid.
A quick look at the latest Hays County statistics, May 2010, shows there are 12,817 local residents in the Medicaid program. Of those, 9,733 are children or teenagers. The remainder fall in various categories – disabled and blind, foster care children, newborns, medically needy, various adults, and the aged.
In general, statistics show that Texas pays for a little less than 30 cents out of every dollar spent on Medicaid. The remainder is covered by federal funds. Legislators and the Governor can claim that, sure, a lot of those federal funds are paid in by Texans. But, if we decide to pull out of Medicaid, that doesn’t mean we won’t have to continue to pay into the federal government.
Let’s looks at the upside though, of pulling out of Medicaid.
That means most of the elderly in nursing homes will get to move back in with their families. What? You don’t want to take care of grandparents and parents? Your family can’t live off just one salary, while your spouse quits his or her job to take care of your elderly parents?
Oh.
Because when you look at the nursing homes here in Hays County and across the state, you find that two-thirds of their residents’ care is funded by Medicaid.
Some of the most vulnerable citizens – elderly, children and disabled – would be without medical care. Those who cannot care for themselves would have to depend on their families – if their families are able – to do all the hard labor of caring 24 hours a day for their family members.
“Back in the day” families did, in fact, take care of their own. “Back in the day” when most families had a major breadwinner and a stay-at-home person who “kept the kids” also took in the elderly.
But, with the economy as it is now, there are few families who can take on that responsibility.
Sure, Perry doesn’t mean that the elderly would be dumped on the streets. Sure, he thinks there is another way for Texans to take care of the medically fragile who happen to need nursing care.
But if he has an idea on how we can possibly take care of all of those on Medicaid on the 30 percent of the Texas share of our Medicaid budget – or even, let’s be optimistic, on 40 percent – then let’s make that suggestion to Congress, to the Health and Human Services Department.
Texas would be the hero! We would have saved the system! We would save the federal government billions!
The likelihood of folks here in Texas having that kind of magical ability is slim, though. Several other states have already taken their chance, decided to pull their system out of Medicaid and found that the experiment was a disaster.
Texans are a proud people. We take care of our own; we walk with pride; we balance our budget.
One thing we really do not want to see are the faces of the elderly without proper care. A vision of the poor during the Depression comes to mind. The blank stare. Think of Maw sitting in her rocker on the back of the open truck in the movie, “The Grapes of Wrath.”
It’s not something we want to repeat. Don’t pull out of Medicaid. Fix it or tweak it. Just don’t think that we can pull completely out of the system without having a devastating problem on our hand.
