Medicaid Mumbo-Jumbo

Oh, how this sends visions of HB 2922 dancing through my head:

Among the ideas is customizing benefit packages for groups with different healthcare needs. For example, he said, healthy children need access to different services than adults with disabilities or elderly Texans needing long-term care in a nursing home.

Asked whether that meant some people would receive fewer benefits than others, Perry said his goal is to find the plan “where there are winners and winners, not winners and losers.”

That sounds reasonable, right? Not necessarily. Healthy children do need access to a wide range of services, although they are clearly not ready for a nursing home in most cases. Trimming down benefits for healthy children is asking for trouble.

For one thing, where to you start? Do you cut benefits for diagnostic tests that may be needed when a healthy child exhibits symptioms that may mean childhood cancer? Will children who need diagnostic services be cut out of the loop?

Just because a child is healthy today doesn’t mean he will be healthy tomorrow.

Here are some more potentially problematic proposals:

• Offer subsidies so that more of Texas’ small businesses provide health insurance to their employees.

• Give “customized” benefits packages to different groups of Medicaid recipients.

• Put part of the benefit in a “savings account” under a patient’s control, which is a pet idea of conservative health care experts.

I believe Congress has considered “subsidies” before. Plus, I don’t think that giving money to big business so that they can give that money to the insurance industry is the answer. The “savings accounts,” of course, would be an unmitigated disaster.

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