Migrants and Medicaid - Someone is going to pay the price

Migrants and Medicaid – The Not-So-Hidden Costly Consequences 

 

By James Terminiello 

 

Full disclosure first: I have a 35-year-old son, permanently disabled at age 3, who receives Medicaid... for the moment. 

 

Following a toss-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater strategy, the federal government is revisiting all those on Medicaid as part of the “unwinding of the Medicaid continuous enrollment program” that extended coverage to a considerable swath of people during the pandemic. (1) The fact that my son and many others like him qualified for and received Medicaid years before COVID-19 reared its ugly head seems to be of little relevance. And bureaucracies being the glacially swift entities that they are, my son’s coverage could potentially slip away long before they review his case – which, by the way, is designated with an ominously long ten-digit number.  

 

Running concurrent with this impending slow-motion trainwreck is a national push to extend Medicaid coverage to the ongoing wave of undocumented migrants now remaking our landscape. (2) How one can be “undocumented” and still receive Medicaid which, when last I looked, requires an Everest of documentation is a brain poser for greater minds than I to process.  

 

When viewed from a dispassionate satellite in high orbit, there appears to be a coming intersection between the needs of citizen Medicaid recipients and the undulating flow of newbies who have penetrated our gossamer borders. As this is a somewhat under-the-radar dilemma, we have an opportunity for the Biden Administration to do a bit of quiet belt-tightening with our lavishly over-extended national budget. Granted that belt-tightening is something that those in control of the money hose in DC are quite unfamiliar with, they still might see an opportunity here to play with funding. After all, the exhausted money presses need to be stopped, oiled, and refitted from time to time. 

 

So, will it come down to a choice? Or will there be hardships for all around? It will be interesting to see.  

 

But for those of you who feel that borders are a thing of the past, that all are welcome no matter who or what they are, that concerns about the massive migratory costs are merely lame political excuses, and that any type of quota or system of regulation is just so much nonsense, I hope you will think of my son and other Americans like him.     

 

James Terminiello, author of the acclaimed satire Junkyard and a rabid opponent of the thing called autism, writes from Mount Laurel, New Jersey 

 

(1)https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/10-things-to-know-about-the-unwinding-of-the-medicaid-continuous-enrollment-provision/#:~:text=As%20part%20of%20the%20Consolidated,matching%20funds%20through%20December%202023. 

 

(2)https://news.bloomberglaw.com/health-law-and-business/states-push-to-expand-medicaid-to-undocumented-immigrants