I heard part of a report earlier this morning about the almost 7 million people in the U.S. who are on parole, probation, in prison or locked up in jail that are being considered for healthcare coverage mostly by the Medicaid expansion portion of ObamaCare that is a loophole in which county officials in six states so far avoid using their own budgets to help sick prisoners. It didn't take long to find more detail online & you can just imagine the unsympathetic online comments. Click here for the most complete analysis I found.
State & local governments generally must provide prisoners healthcare & ObamaCare excludes convicts from coverage but does open the aforementioned loophole that county officials eager to lower their own costs that totaled $6.5 billion in 2008 are taking advantage of. About 13 million people are booked into county jails each year. Source the National Association of Counties.
We are finding out that any bill that has between 900 & 2,700 pages depending on the font size & spacing will have loopholes to be found & unexpected additional expenses for federal taxpayers to pick up.
When people are booked into jail these days, they get photographed & fingerprinted, turn over their personal property, go through a full-body scan & complete an application for Medicaid. About 90 percent of inmates are uninsured & a disproportionate rate have communicable & chronic diseases & behavioral disorders. About 488,000 people in U.S. prisons and jails suffer from a mental illness. Source the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Arlington, Virginia.
Just as cities like Detroit & Chicago are planning on moving retirees into the ObamaCare exchanges so too are state & local governments using the health-care overhaul to save money.
Former ND Senator Kent Conrad was contacted by Bloomberg & Conrad said he didn't "recall discussions about the law's being used to cover inmates" & that he was bothered by federal taxpayers picking up part of this tab. Conrad added "it starts to look a little like a scheme by the states & local jurisdictions to avoid responsibilities that are really theirs."
The point to me is that someone is going to pay one way or the other & in this case the closer that payer is to that jail or prison the better.
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