Newest Outrage: Obamacare Will Help Some of the Most Helpless:
Gather 'round, motherfuckers. Let's all circle up and listen to what's gonna no doubt be the next Obamacare outrageous outrage that we can all rage about. Are you ready? Can you handle the truth? Ok, you've been warned:
It seems that, get this, some of the poor people helped by Medicaid are people who have - hold your loved ones close - criminal records. Shocking, no? That in a nation with a greater per capita incarceration rate than Russia, China, or Rwanda, some of those who are or were prisoners or who were or are on probation might be poor enough to qualify for the Affordable Care Act's expansion of Medicaid coverage in the states that accepted funding for it.
Or, as Forbes puts it, "You can be sure that there are plenty of taxpayers who work hard and play by the rules, who are wondering why they should pay more in taxes for this purpose. It’s certainly not what they were told they were paying for when Obamacare was passed." Ah, that's some pure powder of fake offense that you can snort off the tits of a Fox "news" anchor.
There's two things going on here. One of them is purely statistical: According to a Justice Department report on the effects of the Affordable Care Act, "Estimates indicate that at least 35 percent of new Medicaid eligibles under the Affordable Care Act will have a history of criminal justice system involvement. (Calculations based on the estimated size of newly eligible population, the size of the justice involved population and the share of that population without insurance.)" To put that in numbers, "approximately 10 million Americans are either in jail or released from prison each year; if approximately 60 percent of these individuals are uninsured enrollees in the appropriate income range, and the Medicaid expansion was originally estimated to cover 16 million people, then more than 35 percent of the Medicaid expansion population is comprised" of people who have danced with the criminal justice system. We imprison a fuckload of people. Chances are that they're gonna need health care, too.
The other part is that states and counties are actively working to get inmates to sign up for Medicaid because, when it comes to things like long hospital stays, shit's expensive. Medicaid under Obamacare helps pay for more serious treatment for prisoners. Even more importantly, "inmates who are enrolled in Medicaid while in jail or prison can have coverage after they get out. People coming out of jail or prison have disproportionately high rates of chronic diseases, especially mental illness and addictive disorders." And you know what allows them to get their medication and other help, which might actually prevent them from going back to prison? Yeah, health insurance, bitches. And one has to wonder how many of those prisoners are there for minor things, like marijuana use.
Something is being done to help one of the most neglected portions of our country's population. So, of course, it's time to lube up the dildos on the right-wing Orgasmatron 2014. Dial it up to "Fast and Furious." Insert it in your anus, Ted Cruz-ites, and go to town. Prisoners are getting health care on our tax dollars. They're also being fed and housed, too, but don't complicate the talking point.
"It will come as cold comfort to law-abiding taxpayers that their rising healthcare costs are being used to subsidize care for criminals," says some excessively wrong tool writing for the online urinal, Townhall. Newsmax and The Daily Caller are able to tie in George Soros and Chicago politics to the prisoners-on-Medicaid story in a fistfuck orgy of name checking. Newsbusters can't understand why in the world major networks aren't covering this very important story because they say it's important.
All we need is a Louis Gohmert seizure, a Ted Cruz pseudo-filibuster, and a Sean Hannity jack-off-athon, and we'll have reached maximum idiot density.
The Rude Pundit doesn't know about you, but he's not excited at the idea of unhealthy ex-cons wandering the streets of America. He wants them to get taken care of. Real studies suggest that Obamacare might actually reduce crime. But, again, it's way easier to yell that your tax dollars are paying for birth control for crack moms or some such shit.
