March madness is upon us—and no, I don’t mean the Lobos going to the Big Dance. Rather, later this month the Supreme Court will finally hear legal challenges to the federal health care reform law, aka the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare. Remember the March madness of two years ago when the law was passed?
Each month, the Human Services Department posts figures showing the number of people in different categories enrolled in Medicaid (with a four-month lag). They just released the numbers for October 2011, broken down by adults and children and by various categories. Once again, children’s enrollment was down to 336,436. This is about the same as October 2010 (336,034), even though the number of New Mexico children has grown almost 2 percent over the year.
Two governors named Scott are proposing changes to their states’ Medicaid program that will be devastating for their kids. Governor Rick Scott is proposing a plan for Florida that could result in 800,000 people, most of them children, losing their health care. In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker (who faces a recall election for implementing other unpopular policy changes) is calling for a plan that could result in 64,000 losing their health care coverage.
Congratulations and gratitude goes out to our friends at the Center on Law and Poverty for representing the workers and winning the case. Our thanks also go out to the injured workers who were courageous enough to bring the lawsuit on behalf of the 10,000 agricultural workers who will now benefit directly from workers’ compensation benefits. It’s a good time to remember that when more of us are protected, all of us benefit from a safer and more just society.
The number of children experiencing homelessness in New Mexico is growing fast. We have 16,260 homeless children—that’s enough kids to fill The Pit, UNM’s basketball arena. These children are often hungry, frequently sick, and always fearful of what each new day may bring. They never know how long they’ll stay in one place and many of them suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or other emotional problems. They live in a world basically invisible to most of us. They have no power and no voice to be heard by the policy-makers who could help.
The new federal dollars flowing to New Mexico health care providers will generate billions more in economic activity, creating tens of thousands of new jobs and raising about $1billion in new state tax revenue—far more than the state’s share of the cost of implementing ACA. The more aggressive the state is in expanding health care to uninsured New Mexicans, the greater the health and economic benefits to the state.
Even as he paints a drab picture of the American health care system, Daschle was also optimistic about Americans’ future and what we can all do to address health care costs in this country. He emphasized that the issue is "emotional, very, very difficult and extremely challenging. What we do know is that we can’t afford to fail to fix the problems because at the current rate it is unsustainable.”
Politics can make for strange bedfellows. In an unusual break with the Obama administration, several prominent Democrats in Congress have filed an amicus ("friend of the court") brief in the Supreme Court, urging that private citizens be allowed to sue states that are not fulfilling their obligation to provide health care to eligible Medicaid recipients if they accept federal Medicaid funds (which all the states do).
There has been a lot of media attention lately about the importance of Medicare to seniors, thanks to the U.S. House-passed budget proposal that would have eliminated Medicare as we know it. The vast majority of voters would agree that Congress should keep their hands off Medicare. What’s getting less attention is that Medicaid is equally important to voters and especially important to voters in New Mexico.
If access to health care is a human right – as suggested in a recent op ed by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) – then it makes slaves of physicians, hospital janitors, and everyone else working in the health care sector. That’s according to Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), the physician-cum-politician, who never saw a government program he didn’t hate.