Healthcare Shouldn't Be A Game
The federal government is shut down. Sixteen months after the 2025 budget should have been finalized, Congress found itself at an impasse with the latest last-second extension. A shutdown is bad enough with 750,000 workers furloughed, and services still being paid for by our taxes, but not available for public use. The reason for the shutdown is even worse.
The healthcare system is in disarray and poised to become significantly more expensive.
You may have heard statements that the shutdown is because Democrats want to give undocumented immigrants free healthcare. That is ridiculous. It is against the law for federal funds for Medicaid, Medicare, and ACA to be used by undocumented immigrants, with one exception: emergency care.
Hospitals are required, by law, to provide emergency care to anyone who needs it, regardless of their ability to pay or insurance status. As a result, hospitals receive federal Medicaid reimbursement for any uninsured patients who meet the Medicaid eligibility requirements, regardless of their immigration status. But not for long.
That is where the poorly named “One Big Beautiful Bill” enters. It reduces the reimbursement a hospital gets when it provides emergency care to an undocumented immigrant, care that they are legally and morally obligated to provide.
That’s only the beginning. Additional restrictions were added to receiving Medicaid, which will cause millions of Americans to lose their coverage. This also means that fewer uninsured patients will be eligible for reimbursement for emergency care, resulting in increased costs for hospitals.
When hospitals’ costs increase, they have to charge insurance companies more money to keep the hospital running, and the insurance company passes those costs on to you. If a hospital has distressed finances, those extra costs and reduced revenue will cause some of them to fail. 20% of adults and 40% of children in rural areas use Medicaid. Rural hospitals have already been struggling. Over the past decade, 160 rural hospitals have shut down, primarily due to financial stress. Almost half of rural hospitals were operating at a loss in 2023.
And now the OBBB is estimated to cause a $135 billion loss in funds over the next decade for rural hospitals. Once Republicans realized how bad this would be for their political future, they added a last-minute provision to the OBBB that created a $50 billion rural hospital rescue fund. Besides the obvious issue of it being only a fraction of the lost revenue, it expires, while the losses are permanent.
I’m afraid there’s still more. During Covid and its recovery, subsidies for Affordable Care Act premiums were enacted and extended. These expire January 1st, 2026, three months from now. Over 20 million American citizens will see their monthly payments more than double at a time when they are struggling to get by, and the economy, alongside job opportunities, is stagnating.
Healthcare is already facing a crisis where 90 million Americans are unable to access quality, affordable healthcare, and nearly 30% of adults have skipped or postponed medical care due to cost. We’re less healthy than our peer nations and die younger. Republicans would rather shut down the government than deal with the problem.
And don’t believe that Republicans are planning to solve it later. Three months is a blink of an eye considering the snail's pace of Congress, and these months encompass major holidays. If you still want to give them the benefit of the doubt, you should know that the House has been put on recess again, when the previous one never really ended. The last vote was over two weeks ago.
Given that the very discussion of how to address the impending price increases and coverage losses in healthcare could end the shutdown, if Republicans were genuinely concerned about fixing the looming healthcare problems, they’d be working on it right now.
The idea that taking healthcare away from others will make it cheaper and better for you is a callous dream. Those cuts strain the system, increase costs, and limit access to care for the nation as a whole. Healthcare isn’t a zero-sum game. When we work together, all of our lives improve. Let’s look at an example of this:
We have a law requiring hospitals to provide emergency care to everyone, a law passed by a Republican president. Hopefully, we can agree that this is also the bare minimum of being a civilized society. Emergency care is expensive because it is when the issue is at its worst, and the care to fix it is the most complex. Routine preventive care reduces healthcare costs because problems are identified early, care is less invasive, and complications are reduced. If we’re going to cover emergency care, then we should also cover routine preventive care to reduce costs and wait times at the emergency room.
That is universal healthcare.
Universal healthcare doesn’t mean providing every possible medical service for free. It means ensuring everyone has access to necessary medical care, including preventive care. Beyond that, costs will vary from small copays for additional care to higher costs for elective procedures. Universal healthcare is the most effective way to address America’s numerous healthcare issues, including reducing the overall cost to the nation.
So while the President is busy posting childish memes, and the Republican Speaker of the House declared another vacation, know that they’re not only refusing to improve healthcare, they’re deliberately standing idly by to watch the problems worsen.
You have a voice. Use it to tell Congress you want quality, affordable healthcare, and you’re ready to vote out whoever stands in the way.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/658148/inability-pay-care-medicine-hits-new-high.aspx
Basic Income Is A Powerful Solution
We're born into a world where everything is owned, jobs don’t pay enough to cover the bills, and we’re told that guaranteeing a minimum standard of living is a handout. This is the design of the privileged to ensure they hold money and power while generational poverty abounds.