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Parkinsn Current Topics
Medicare/Medicaid...Congress wants your Home/Car
In the United States, if you have, or care for someone with Parkinson's or the parkinsonian family of ailments, the following Editorial in the San Francisco Examiner may stir you to action. My comments follow the article. Substitute the word Alzheimer's with Parkinson's dementia.
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Medicaid 'reform' will convert nursing homes into snake pits
CHRISTOPHER MATTHEWS Examiner's Washington bureau chief
Sun, Oct. 8, 1995
POLITICS doesn't always involve an in-your-face moral dilemma. I can think of many recent fights - NAFTA is one - where the issue had to be decided roughly, with weightier questions of social equity left for history to adjudicate. Some political questions require, however, an immediate reckoning of what we value, want kind of a country we want to be. Among them, I submit to you, is the move on Capitol Hill to slash the Medicaid protections of the millions of older Americans who can no longer provide for their well-being. Today, a husband who cannot afford an expensive nursing home for his Alzheimer's-afflicted spouse can receive Medicaid assistance, subject to certain tough conditions. He must "spend down" his assets to an extremely modest level and contribute enough of his monthly income to bring that down to a required level as well. He is permitted to keep his residence and his car. The proposal being rammed through the House of Representatives would impose an even more onerous regimen. To provide for a demented spouse, a husband could be forced to forfeit everything. To keep his wife in a decent home, he could no longer be secure in his own. If a state like California wanted to confiscate his house to meet a budget shortfall, there would be nothing standing in its way. The Medicaid legislation that cleared the Commerce Committee in the House last week does other damage to the compact we share with older Americans. It eliminates the minimal human standards that now govern the country's nursing homes, standards enacted by both parties in 1987 and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. If the current bill clears Congress, it would take us back to the Snake Pit: rows of patients living in drug-induced delirium, the physical abuse, the forlorn, ragtag hospital wings without so much as a fire door. The one hope that these Dickensian "reforms" will not come to pass is the growing uproar from voters, Republican and Democrat alike. People of every political philosophy are starting to wonder why a country as advanced and optimistic as ours should accept new budget policies that (1) procure B-2 Stealth bombers and Seawolf nuclear submarines for no strategic purpose whatever and (2) demolish the health protections of the very generations whose endurance and patriotism won the Cold War victory that makes such weapons unnecessary. Here is one case where the public opinion polls may do more than entertain the pundits and political watchers. They may actually save the day. According to a new ABC survey, a powerful 65 percent of the American people disapprove of what Congress is doing. They are reacting to the cuts in Medicare and Medicaid with the same vehemence being shown against the O.J. verdict. By 2 to 1, people say that we did not spend a half century and trillions of dollars defeating communism so that we could deprive the victors their dignity as well as their livelihood. I believe that people who worked and paid taxes all their lives deserve to be treated better. I believe that spouses of Alzheimer's victims - spouses such as Nancy Reagan - should be applauded for their valiant caregiving. I believe that those with fewer resources need the Medicaid protection that her husband helped, in his time, to guarantee.
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Think About It!
Some of the same folks we contacted to provide more funding for 'Finding the Cure' support increasing the 'homelessness' by forcing those who rely on Medicare or Medicaid to forfeit their spouse's home and car.
Does it matter that we can't get long term medical coverage at any cost? In our, "I got mine, too bad that you didn't get yours" world, pulling the safety net out from under 'care-givers' and 'families in the home' is to much.
Folks, unless those at risk, rise up and protest this travesty in the guise of 'balancing the budget', we can kiss goodbye everything that we have worked for and contributed to mankind. Every congress person must hear our voice...NOW! This is not something to aquiesce on, "Soylent Green" is closer than you think!
Some cultures send the frail and infirm on a journey....Is this where civilized peoples are heading?...To balance the budget?
Rally your support groups, call and write your congress person regardless of their policics and tell them; Decent people want this STOPPED!...NOW!
John Cottingham "The parkinsn list brings Knowledge, Comfort, Hope, and Friendship to the parkinsonian world." johnc@iadfw.net =========================================================================
Medicare/Medicaid...Congress wants your Home/Car
In response to overwhelming public sentiment, the morning paper reports the following:
excerpt..
Another major change was made to that part of the reconciliation bill that deals with Medicaid, the federal-state program that pays medical costs for the poor, the disabled and thousands of elderly nursing home residents.
As originally drafted, the bill would have allowed states to seize the money and property from the spouses and adult children of nursing home patients to pay for their care before any Medicaid moneywould have gone to help them. Current law prohibits tapping the resources of spouses and adultchildren, and the latest revision would continue that practice.
Rep. Thomas S. Bliley, R-Va., who heads the House Commerce Committee, announced this reversal from the provision, bitterly protested, in the bill that his committee had approved.
"In the Commerce Committee, we pride ourselves on our ability to listen and to make improvements in legislation when called for," he said in a statement. "We should not risk a single American going to the poorhouse just because a spouse or parent had to enter a nursing home."
Applause....
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