The impact the "Big Beautiful Bill" will have on Medicaid is distressing
Published 4:27 p.m. yesterday
By Bob Bilbro
At Healing Transitions, an inpatient residential recovery facility in Raleigh, over the last year progress has been made by clients with medical issues being enrolled with Medicaid.
Now when they finish the program after about a year or more, they leave with a job, drug-free housing, connectivity to the recovery community, and a relationship with a primary care physician through Medicaid coverage.
The latter arrangement results in better management of chronic medical conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes. These men and women have less emergency visits and less hospitalizations.
With the current proposed changes by Congress for Medicaid requiring periodic re-registration verifying employment, Medicaid coverage will often lapse and so goes the relationship with their primary care physician and their management of health issues. Healthcare costs will increase and health quality will decline.
In a few states where registration of work requirements for Medicaid coverage have been implemented, administrative costs have exceeded savings in healthcare expenditures. Also, patients frequently had interruption in their Medicaid coverage due to insufficient compliance with administrative steps.
In the USA we spend twice as much per person as other industrialized nations on healthcare, and we have worse health outcomes. Our average life expectancy is less and we have more preventable deaths. We are the only industrialized nation without health insurance in one form or another for all citizens. Why can we not learn from those examples?
By congressional action we will move in the wrong direction for both medical costs and health outcomes. Do we care?
Dr. Bob Bilbro is a retired physician and active support of Healing Transitions in Raleigh.
