Letter to the Editor
HEALTH CARE ON THE ROPES?
The barking attack dogs we hear against the Affordable Care Act (a\k\a “Obamacare”); whether on talk radio, televised “news” programs, or elected officials in our state government have one premise correct.
The “national health care industry” has been in crisis for decades in this country. It is a crisis of our own design; most developed countries in the world choose to provide inexpensive universal health care instead of large standing armies bloated with corporate war profiteers.
Last week, the Catholic non-profit hospital in Independence, KS shut its doors, took down the Emergency Room sign, dismissing 200 medical workers. The Kansas Hospital Association estimates 15 others may be closing in the near future claiming it comes from Kansas law makers’ refusal to expand the “Obamacare” version of Medicaid.
This weekend St. Francis Health, Topeka mailed a letter to my son stating that effective October 16th part time clinics in Nortonville, Winchester and Oskaloosa are closing. He has suffered from birth with Type 1 Diabetes and requires daily multiple insulin shots, and does not qualify for Medicaid. He, like the estimated 150,000 other Kansans are just one health catastrophe away from a major financial disaster that will endure throughout his life.
A recent analysis of the Kansas Health Institute concluded expansion for Medicaid would provide Kansas hospitals with nearly $100 million more a year than they will lose in Medicare reimbursement reductions.
The governor and his allies are aware of the fact that the federal government is legally bound to pay 100 percent of the cost of Medicaid expansion through the end of 2016 and no less than 90 percent of the cost thereafter.
I wonder if they want you to not know that fact?
Do you think the more than 330,000 Kansas business owners who do not pay state income taxes any longer want you to know that fact too?
Upton Sinclair wrote in 1934, “"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
Mike Caddell
Radio Free Kansas
North Jefferson County
