Dead Giveaway: Why don't more Americans use their free health insurance?

[Recursion]

From Slate:

A thousand people gathered at a California Gucci outlet in the wee morning hours a few weeks ago, eager for Black Friday retail bargains. Seven times as many waited at the doors of the Macy's flagship store in New York City, and a modern-day shantytown was erected on Thanksgiving night in an Oakland Best Buy parking lot. One can only imagine the frenzy that would have broken out if someone had started handing out high-quality, free health insurance worth as much as a dozen wide-screen televisions.

And yet the bargain outlets giving away health insurance this season are eerily quiet. As Benjamin Sommers and Arnold Epstein recently reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, 40 percent of people who qualify for free coverage through the government's Medicaid program don't sign up. In the worst-performing states, like Oregon, Florida, Georgia, and Texas, more than half the eligible people aren't enrolled. Using adjusted estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, tens of millions of Americans don't take the freebie, and tens of billions of dollars' worth of coverage are left on the table.

That's a huge problem for the architects of health reform, whose central aim is helping the 50 million Americans now without insurance. Much attention has been paid to the "individual mandate" in the landmark bill passed earlier this year, which has now been ruled unconstitutional by a Virginia federal court. But previous experience suggests that provision's impact on rates would be trivial. The real driver of expanded coverage is a planned extension of free health care to anybody with an income below 133 percent of the poverty line—or 15 million Americans, according to an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office. This entitlement is the biggest new federal giveaway of health care since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.

Unfortunately, people might not show up for the bargains. Consider what happened the last time we tried to give away more health care. In the late 1990s, the State Children's Health Insurance Program made it easier for children to get Medicaid-style insurance, and by 2002, almost half of all American kids qualified for free coverage. As a result, the number of uninsured dropped from 12 million to 10 million, which was great news. But consider the missed opportunity: Among the 10 million children who still lacked coverage, 60 percent were eligible for free care but never signed up.

Read on for more; it seems to mostly be states trying to keep their Medicaid rolls down because it's costing them more than they like to spend.

[guruoo]

1. Poverty line chart, FAQ:

Poverty line chart
(pdf format):
http://www.coverageforall.org/pdf/FHCE_FedPovertyLevel.pdf

Federal poverty line FAQ:
http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/faq.shtml

[ThomCat]

2. When poor people claim that they've been kicked out of

programs for no reason that they qualified for the reaction is always, "oh, sure, of course you didn't do anything wrong. Of course you were qualified." :eyes:

You can hear the sarcasm dripping.

But when you talk to other people coming out of the public assistance office after contesting their denials, and every one of them were given the identical excuse it becomes very obvious.

I was personally part of one mass denial where everyone at once was told that we made too much money the previous year to qualify for foodstamps. No matter how much money we made the previous year we all were told we were overqualified by the exact same dollar amount.

I think it was $35. I am not sure I remember the exact amount anymore.

For over 200 people to all be told that we were overqualified by that same dollar amount is impossible unless it was a blatant excuse, not a real fact-based denial. They were just purging people from foodstamps and other public assistance benefits just to cut their budget numbers.

Everyone was required to reapply in the hope of maybe getting help reestablished the next month, which meant a best case scenario of 1 month without any assistance. Many people never got back on assistance because they would repeatedly deny applications this same way for no good reason just to keep budget numbers low.

So when you hear that programs are doing this, believe it! Not only have you heard it first hand from someone who who it happened to, you have also read about it in at least this one article that confirms that it happens. I hope you have also been reading other articles here that confirms that it happens, and I hope that you're speaking up about it.

The widespread belief that poor people are automatically liars is a common prejudice, and it's just part of the unnecessary burden of being poor.