With the new Medicare program reaching it’s first birthday, we are going to start hearing more stories like this:
Ever since Judy Clifford’s parents died, she had planned to move with her husband into their Nashville, Tenn., home, which she knew so well.
“I felt like they were still there,” says Ms. Clifford, who is retired. “I could see my mother standing at the sink washing dishes and my daddy watching TV, and I wanted to stay in the house because of that.”
Instead, the two-bedroom ranch-style home is for sale for $122,000, the subject of a bitter tug-of-war between the Cliffords and TennCare, Tennessee’s healthcare program for the poor and uninsured. TennCare has laid claim to the home to recoup the cost of caring for Clifford’s mother, who was on TennCare when she died three years ago.
In the face of soaring Medicaid costs, Tennessee and every other state are required to set up a Medicaid estate-recovery program. Many have been launched only recently, and some – like Tennessee’s – are becoming more aggressive. Often, they target the home because it’s all that’s left after beneficiaries have spent their assets to pay for nursing-home care.
But the varied ways in which states are going after these assets have produced confusion, anger, and even lawsuits. When a loved one dies, some families are stunned to lose the home, too, advocates say.
This is one of the leftovers we have from the 109th Congress. During the first months of 2006, states and citizens screamed about the problems of the new Medicare program. The Republican leadership went to the public and lied, saying that the program was working great. It wasn’t. States that were already strapped for cash had to take drastic measures to help with the costs.
Now people are starting to pay for those costs. While the ultra-greedy 109th Congress, under the leadership of Republicans, worked hard to try and give tax cuts to the richest corporations, and the richest citizens, the poorest people of this country were ignored. America was given a stark reminder of poverty and the poor in this country when Katrina hit. How did our leaders respond? They tried time and time again to prevent the richest 5% of the country from having to pay an inheritance tax. These greedy bastards even tried to couple this legislation to a bill that would help the poor by raising the minimum wage. They just don’t care.
Thinking about this story and the news yesterday of Saddam’s verdict being upheld I have come to a conclusion. What George Bush, Dick Cheney, Bill Frist, John Boehner, Tom Delay and all the other Republicans have done amounts to genocide. We saw that during Katrina, and it continued on last year with Medicare. It may not have been as dramatic as what Saddam did, but it was genocide none the less. Perhaps we should institute the “justice” that Iraq is doing and put these people on trial and if convicted, sentence them to hang. They work hard to kill the citizens they don’t care for (the poor), so what is the major difference?