Medicaid is Great or How to Twist a Story

Before I even start on this study and their “conclusions” let me have you take a second and think about Medicaid. Visualize the clinics and their staff.  Visualize the patients, their habits and their compliance.  Visualize the doctors working there and their demeanor.

Take a second to do this.

Now, I tried NOT to put any of my biases in your thoughts. I didn’t even use a Medicaid clinic waiting room as the picture above just for that reason. And this is not an editorial to bash Medicaid patients.  If you are a doctor or nurse you probably have experiences that make up your images. I am willing to bet that we are ALL probably close to having the same pictures in our minds and that they are pretty close to reality.

Now, read this:

Medicaid coverage is not only substantially better than being uninsured, but it is also as good as or better than private insurance in providing access to care, according to a new survey of 6000 people by the Commonwealth Fund, a New York–based think tank.

Really?  Immediately you should know something is wrong.  First, the Commonwealth Fund is a VERY BIASED group that leans extremely left. You can search this site for more on that (see search button on lower right).

Second, they are talking about coverage.  Well, coverage is FREE to Medicaid recipients. They pay nothing. For Obamacare and private care, people are having trouble affording to pay the premiums and the office fees. So they don’t go.

Here is more:

Medicaid enrollees were much more likely than the uninsured to receive preventive care, such as blood pressure checks, cholesterol screenings, and flu shots, the survey shows. They were also more likely to receive cancer screenings, such as mammograms and colonoscopies.

Well, you need to be able to afford to go to the doctor and again, it has been proven Obamacare has created a system where patients are NOT going anymore.  It is ironic how the extreme left created the Obamacare system and now are using it the “bad” standard to compare it to Medicaid. I just wonder if they looked at preventive care prior to Obamacare how well Medicaid would hold up?

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I don’t know what fake news is anymore.  I guess The Onion does fake news and it is funny as hell. This, however, is biased news and it is important to pick it apart just like we physicians should pick apart new studies that come out. It is obvious that the Commonwealth Fund did the survey.  They set it up.  It is already biased.  There could be tons of problems with their methods but I will let that go for now.  Their conclusions are absolutely skewed to their politically viewpoint.  They WANT a single-payer system.  All their “surveys” and “research” are based at convincing others of this goal and they work backwards to prove it.  In other words, they form a conclusion and then find data or create ways to find data to prove that.  This is NOT how the scientific method works. 

Go back to the beginning of this piece.  I had you visualize your experience to the Medicaid system.  Do you really believe that they are now getting better care than insured patients?  Yeah, I thought so. This is not saying that Medicaid patients deserve less quality care.  I am just asking for your experiences as it relates to the Commonwealth Fund’s supposed conclusions.

I am not a fan of the present system of Obamacare.  Obviously.  I also hate the insurance model as it is presently being used.  I believe in the free market and using insurance only for catastrophic reasons.  This blog is based on that and so now you know my biases.

So, to sum this up, is Medicaid great or did they just twist this story?  You can decide for yourself.