Thursday, November 3, 2011

Fayetteville Observer's Medicaid Crayon Dreams





The Charlotte Observer’s favorite toady editorial board of late is from the Fayetteville Observer. This past Monday, the east coast version of the Disturber published an inane attack on North Carolina’s General Assembly. Here is how the article led off:

Scores of thousands of our neighbors in the Cape Fear region are eligible for Medicaid assistance. There is nothing abstract about the debate raging in Raleigh.

In its budget for the current fiscal year, the General Assembly set out to soak poor children, the ill and the elderly for $356 million. To that end, they included language that mandates service cuts if administrators fail to pony up on time. Health officials are scrambling to comply, but predict they'll come up millions short and have to terminate certain services to many of their 1.5 million clients.

Wow! What a bunch of heartless bastards! Those bad republican legislators (let’s make no mistake who these libtard editors are attacking) are throwing the poor and elderly under the bus. How can these 1 percenters get away with screwing over the most vulnerable amongst us? Well, only one has to Google to find out what kind of financial crisis Medicaid is under in the state of North Carolina:

The administrators in North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue’s office have announced that the state’s Medicaid health insurance program could face a $139 million dollar shortfall in the coming year due, in part, to slow enrollment of the chronically ill. In addition, the state Medicaid agency must make repayments for accounting errors and improper billings adding up to $300 million that occurred several years ago.

State health regulators say that the NC Medicaid insurance program is falling short of meeting the $356 million in net reductions for the division that oversees the program. A budget was created to address Medicaid finances, which Governor Perdue vetoed because of the severity of the cuts; however, the Legislature overrode the veto, according to Gary Robertson of the Associated Press

But according to the Fayetteville Observer editors, we live in a land of Mountain Dew streams and candy cane trees:

Here's where we are: There is money - unexpectedly high tax collections and a rainy-day fund - that could be tapped to make this budding crisis disappear. Lawmakers, eyeing hurricane damage and other needs, don't want to spend it on Medicaid.

Here's what should happen: All parties to this situation should sit down together and make an earnest effort to corral this problem now, before bad things happen to undeserving people and to the public interest. Get a fix on the shortfall, agree to pay it out of available funds, then do it.

This fuss is ironic, because Medicaid pays for itself, with interest. It just doesn't do it within the framework of a state budget. Consider some service cuts for which the legislature has already provided statutory authority.

Medicaid pays for itself? If it did we wouldn’t be in this situation. And we have a rainy-day fund? That’s news! Maybe that fictitious fund can help pay the other problem North Carolina has:

RALEIGH, N.C. — The unemployment tax for North Carolina businesses will increase by $21 per worker in January to help the state repay the federal government the $2.5 billion it borrowed to cover jobless benefits during the recession.


North Carolina has the nation's sixth-largest debt for extended unemployment benefits, and the unemployment taxes will continue going up by $21 per worker each year until the debt is paid off.

I wonder where all that “unexpectedly high tax collections” is coming from when this state has a 10% unemployment rate.

Since this editorial comes from a newspaper, I have an expectation that these people would have a grasp of what is going on in this state. After reading this crap, I’m beginning to believe that their opinions are being written in crayon.


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