The Republican Party’s plan to repeal and replace Obamacare suggests that lottery winners are the real reason health care costs are so high.
This week, the GOP finally made good on its seven-year promise to repeal and replace former President Obama’s Affordable Care Act by releasing the American Health Care Act (AHCA). The main selling point of the new bill, according to current President Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer, is its diminutive size, weighing in at a light 67 pages. (Easy to pick up with extremely small hands, we presume.)
Weirdly, over 10% of those pages deal with one very specific way to reduce the costs of Medicaid, the government program that subsidizes health care for people of limited means. Yep, a full seven pages of the bill that was seven years in the making are devoted to denying Medicaid benefits to anyone lucky enough to win a significant lottery jackpot.
Under the header ‘Letting States Disenroll High Dollar Lottery Winners’ – the very first item under the ‘Reducing State Medicaid Costs’ section – the AHCA proposes that anyone who wins up to $80k be excluded from Medicaid coverage for one month. The timeout rises incrementally by one month for each additional $10k won, topping out at a 10-year exclusion for winnings of $1.26m. The AHCA also authorizes states to “intercept” gambling windfalls to recover Medicaid benefits furnished to the individual who had the audacity to win while gambling.
While lotteries are consistently cited in the text, the provision actually applies to any gambling winnings, be they derived from lotteries, slot machines, gaming tables or sports betting. (Since the government can only collect what it knows was won, there’s never been a better reason to gamble discreetly with your favorite internationally licensed online gambling site. Preferably using Bitcoin. But I digress…)
THE METHOD BEHIND THE MADNESS
The inspiration behind this lottery fever apparently started in Michigan back in 2011, when a $2m jackpot winner kept claiming food stamps. The following year, the governor signed a bill barring lottery winners from drawing state aid.
Last year, a since-retired GOP congressman filed similar legislation, and the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the government could save $475m over 10 years by cutting off between 9k and 10k lottery winners each month.
By all means, there should be some means-testing applied to America’s various entitlement programs. But given that most major lottery winners go broke within a few years, automatically denying someone Medicaid benefits for 10 years seems wildly inappropriate.
And hey, if you’re going to means-test for health care benefits, why not start with the fact that the majority of those in Congress – on both sides of the aisle – have a personal net worth of well over $1m, yet they enjoy the finest health care benefits in the land, free of charge.
True, that’s employer-sponsored health care, but remember that it’s taxpayers that employ federal politicians, so why not cut taxpayers a break by weaning these socialism-hating GOP pols off that sweet federal teat now? With their wealth, they should have no trouble finding an affordable private health care plan; that is, unless they suffer from a pre-existing condition known as hypocrisy.
