Health Insurance Coverage

Posted on October 10, 2014 by admin

• For those who make too much — and too little — for health insurance, the options are limited, By Jordan Shapiro, October 9, 2014, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “Beverly Jones, a 51-year-old St. Louisan with custody of her three grandchildren, is supposed to get her blood tested every few months to make sure the medicine she takes daily isn’t harming her kidneys. But she can only afford to make the trip to the doctor two times a year because she lacks health insurance. ‘It’s hard for me to accept that I put in so much work and so much time and now that I get sick there is no one that can help me,’ she said. ‘That doesn’t seem fair to me.’ Jones isn’t alone. She is one of nearly 300,000 Missourians who would qualify for government-funded health insurance if they lived across the Mississippi River in Illinois or in 26 other states that have decided to expand their Medicaid programs under the Affordable Care Act. But because Missouri hasn’t agreed to expand its program, Jones said she is forced to go without her blood tests and some of her prescriptions…”
• Medicaid, often criticized, is quite popular with its customers, By Margot Sanger-Katz, October 9, 2014, New York Times: “Low-income people in three Southern states were recently asked whether they preferred Medicaid or private insurance. Guess which one they picked? A study published in the journal Health Affairs found that poor residents of Arkansas, Kentucky and Texas, when asked to compare Medicaid with private coverage, said that Medicaid offered better ‘quality of health care’ and made them better able to ‘afford the health care’ they needed. Medicaid, the federal-state program for poor and disabled Americans, is a frequent political target, often described as substandard because of its restricted list of doctors and the red tape — sometimes even worse than no insurance at all. But repeated surveys show that the program is quite popular among the people who use it…”
• A quarter of Latinos are uninsured, By Teresa Wiltz, October 10, 2014, Stateline: “In the ‘sala de espera,’ or waiting room, at La Clinica del Pueblo, a community health center in Washington, D.C., signs in Spanish encourage patients to ‘Empower yourself!’ and sign up for insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act. Adults slump in chairs, scribbling on application forms, texting friends, waiting. In a tiny office a few feet away, William Joachin, the center’s patient access manager, faces down the frustrations of trying to navigate the federal health care program for the thousands of mostly Central American immigrants who flood the clinic each year. He’s not alone. A year after open enrollment for the ACA began, one in four Latinos living in the U.S. does not have health insurance, according to new census data, more than any other ethnic population in the country—and most states have few backups in place to help those in the coverage gap…”