{"id":8207,"date":"2012-06-30T10:03:06","date_gmt":"2012-06-30T17:03:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=8207"},"modified":"2012-06-30T10:03:06","modified_gmt":"2012-06-30T17:03:06","slug":"republicans-kick-89000-kids-off-medicaid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2012\/06\/30\/republicans-kick-89000-kids-off-medicaid\/","title":{"rendered":"Republicans Kick 89,000 Kids Off Medicaid"},"content":{"rendered":"

One might expect the victims of this Republican policy to be spread all over the US, but that is not the case.  All 89,000 are in just one state, Pennsylvania.  The manner in which Republicans did this clearly demonstrate that that they are misanthropes, without heart and without conscience.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\"30GOPHEALTH\"Since August 2011, 89,000 children<\/a> in Pennsylvania have lost their Medicaid coverage, including many with life-threatening illnesses who were mistakenly deemed ineligible<\/strong>. The state currently hasn\u2019t a clue whether many of these children have any healthcare coverage at all.<\/p>\n

How did this happen?<\/p>\n

In late summer, the Pennsylvania Department of Welfare (DPW) began notifying hundreds of thousands of families by mail that they had ten days to provide necessary documentation in order to keep their children enrolled in Medicaid. If the family missed the deadline\u2014or even if they met it but DPW failed to process<\/a> the paperwork within the ten days\u2014they were dropped from Medicaid.<\/p>\n

Federal law indeed requires that families prove their Medicaid eligibility annually. Pennsylvania requires verification every six months. During the previous administration, under Democratic Governor Ed Rendell, caseloads grew as a result of the recession, while county assistance offices were shorthanded due to budget cuts. Caseworkers simply couldn\u2019t keep pace with the workload and there was a backlog of renewal applications.<\/p>\n

Enter Republican Governor Tom Corbett and his anti-spending, anti-government secretary of public welfare, Gary Alexander. They decided to plow ahead with their new approach to eligibility verification: ten days to receive and process the overdue renewals, and an assumption of ineligibility if the applications weren\u2019t reviewed during that time period<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Predictably, the offices couldn\u2019t keep up with the new deluge of mail. It doesn\u2019t seem a stretch to suggest that a Republican administration\u2014hostile to Medicaid\u2014had identified a weakness in the system, exploited it, so that it could reduce spending while bolstering its claim that the system is broken<\/strong>\u2026 [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <The Nation<\/a>><\/p>\n

In short, this is a premeditated plot to deny benefits to kids they knew were eligible.  This crime is on the same scale as when the Arizona Death Angel, Jan Brewer, caused patients deaths by kicking them off Medicaid, after life saving organ transplants were already scheduled, to fund tax cuts for the rich.<\/font><\/p>\n

Every penny Democrats spend caring for the sick is a penny <\/font><\/h6>\n
Republicans can\u2019t give to a billionaire!<\/font><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One might expect the victims of this Republican policy to be spread all over the US, but that is not the case.  All 89,000 are in just one state, Pennsylvania.  The manner in which Republicans did this clearly demonstrate that that they are misanthropes, without heart and without conscience. Since August 2011, 89,000 children in […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8207\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}