It hit me at work, my group home. One of our boys tried to use his nebulizer. He has asthma, see. The nebulizer is for serious attacks. His worst attack that I've seen happened that morning after breakfast, and I scrambled like a mad bastard to the med supply closet and retrieved this hulking, out-of-date machine and ran back to him.
He used it, then shook his head, still out of breath. "Out," he panted.
So I turned to my staff and told one of them to call in an order of his Duo-Neb to our pharmacy, and told the other to quickly grab his rescue inhaler.
It got worse from there.
His rescue inhaler had enough to see him through this attack, and eventually his air waves were opened up enough for him to relax. However, the pharmacy said that under new Medicaid guidelines, they could not fill his DuoNeb because Medicaid would not pay for it. To cut costs, they had limited this young man to one refill every three months. And we would have to wait another month or so to get it refilled.
So I did some digging. Turns out, privatizing a program that assists the sick and poor in this country is a bad idea. Medicaid in the state of North Carolina has become a cash-grab free-for-all, with the costs being cut to those that need that money the most. Kids.
As well as that fact that Medicaid has still not been expanded as per the Affordable Care Act, benefits are being cut to those that already have Medicaid in this state to make way for for-profit gurus who sell the hopeless notion that there's money to be made off these people.
Governor McCrory came into office warning that our Medicaid system was "broken," citing a bogus study by incoming Sec. Aldona Wos and Medicaid head Carol Steckel that claimed Medicaid overhead and administrative costs were at a whopping 6 percent of the state's Medicaid budget. It wasn't true (more like five) but let's say it was true.
Just for shits and giggles.
Wanna know what the average overhead for Anthem health insurance is? Over seventeen percent.
And it's not like their peers are doing much better.
Yet these very same for-profit "managed care providers" that republicans love to put in charge of Medicaid like to claim they do it for less administrative cost! Maybe on paper, but...
Steckel told a legislative health and human services subcommittee on Feb. 14 that for states with managed care companies running Medicaid, administrative costs are often hidden in the contracts with those companies.
You see, they can make it look all good on paper, but companies are nothing if not adaptable. Actually, Arizona's overhead is closer to 17%, much closer to the average of most for-profit insurance providers.
When your goal is to make money, and you utilize every resource to make money, within the confines of a program that is dedicated to a non-profit goal, someone's going to get screwed over. And in this case, it's our kids.
All this is to say that once I found this out it was a "Hello, Me! Howya Been?" moment. I had been zombified by long hours and jaded into apathy by the notion that politics is a cesspool. Know what? It might be, but we all have to live in that cesspool, in that swamp with the greedy gators. So I did a quick gut check and decided to join up. Enlist, if you will, in the fight for the future of our kids.
And the same goes with schools. Charters don't provide education out of a sense of need or duty. Its the money, man!
Listen, our children can not be used as lab rats in experiments on how to turn the largest profit. High time we got that.