Opening Pandora’s Box
The changes proposed in the Senate and House healthcare bills would affect a large and highly vulnerable population: poor children, people with disabilities, elderly people whose resources have been depleted, and adults suffering from short-term or long-term poverty. Yet, the House and Senate bills contain no direction on how to implement the proposed changes in a way that would not hurt the millions of people the program serves or the many others touched by Medicaid. These high-stakes effects would be left to states and providers to remedy and for these populations to absorb. Our nation’s healthcare system is a large and complex web system of interdependencies among individuals, providers, governments, employers, payers, and many other stakeholders. Any change to one part of that system could cause multiple, hard-to-predict effects on any and every other part.
Thoughts from Ken Kaufman