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Townhall...
When
Health Insurance is Free
By John C. Goodman
9/10/2011
Did
you know that an estimated one of
every three uninsured people in this country is eligible for a
government
program (mainly Medicaid or a state children’s health insurance plan),
but has
not signed up?
Either
they haven’t bothered to sign
up or they did bother and found the task too daunting. It’s probably
some
combination of the two, and if that doesn’t knock your socks off, you
must not
have been paying attention to the health policy debate over the past
year or
so.
Put
aside everything you’ve heard
about Obama Care and focus on this bottom line point: going all the way
back to
the Democratic presidential primary, Obama Care was always first and
foremost
about insuring the uninsured. Yet at the end of the day, the new health
law is
only going to insure about 32 million more people out of more than 50
million
uninsured. Half that goal will be achieved by new enrollment in
Medicaid. But
if you believe the Census Bureau surveys, we could enroll just as many
people
in Medicaid by merely signing up those who are already eligible!
What
brought this to mind was a series
of editorials by Paul Krugman and Health Affairs blog and at my blog)
asserting
that government is so much more efficient than private insurers. Can
you
imagine Aetna or UnitedHealth Care leaving one-third of its customers
without a
sale, just because they couldn’t fill out the paperwork properly? Well
that’s
what Medicaid does, day in and day out.
Put
differently, half of everything
Obama Care is trying to do is necessary only because the Medicaid
bureaucracy
does such a poor job — not of selling insurance, but of giving it away
for
free!
Writing
in Health Affairs the other
day, health policy guru Alain Enthoven and health care executive
Leonard
Schaeffer revealed some of the gory details of what people encounter
when they
do try to sign up for free health insurance from Medi-Cal (California
Medicaid)
in the San Diego office:
Of
the 50 calls made over a
three-month period, only 15 calls were answered and addressed. The
remaining 35
calls were met by a recording that stated, “Due to an unexpected volume
of
callers, all of our representatives are currently helping other people.
Please
try your call again later,” followed by a busy signal and the inability
to
leave a voice message. For the 15 answered calls, the average hold time
was 22
minutes with the longest hold time being 32 minutes...
Read
the rest of the article with
links at Townhall
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