Recession Should Take Blame for Reduced Health Care
Health care providers have to have seen this coming. It’s not like we woke up one morning and saw “Hey, the country’s in a recession.” The economic downturn was gradual and glaringly obvious, and people and organizations everywhere did their best to make preparations. However, many states throughout the United States are preparing to make drastic and unprecedented cuts in health care funds, and this couldn’t be coming at a worse time for consumers. The unemployment rate in December was 7.2%, which was up from November’s 6.8%. There doesn’t seem to be a light at the end of the tunnel any time soon (you can’t help but feel bad for the complete mess that Barack Obama is inheriting) and it is important to know how these health care cuts might affect you and your family.
Health Services for Poor First to Go
Obama has been promising since the inception of his campaign that he wanted to extend health care coverage to include more affordable and widely available health insurance to those in lower income brackets. Now, before he has even been sworn in as the next President of the United States, states are already tossing programs like these out the window. Many states have been gung-ho in the fight to expand their coverage for the working poor, but with the state of the economy the way it is, these once hopeful programs are getting the boot. And the working poor are now becoming more steadily just the “poor,” as jobs continued to get slashed across industries.
States in Dire Straights
No less than 44 states are facing budget shortfalls over the next two years totaling more than $350 billion, according to a recent survey by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal Washington-based think tank. It’s not just the working poor who are being quickly impacted by all of this economic stress. Senior citizens in the state of Illinois are staring in the face of possibly being moved from their cozy nursing homes facing bankruptcy while the homes wait to be paid by the state’s struggling government. Where will they go, you ask? Good question, and one I can’t find the answer to. If you are a low-income woman with breast or cervical cancer living in South Carolina, kiss your full treatment goodbye. The state is starting with this program and lowering its offerings, so I can only hope that most of these women are in remission and can stay healthy. Either that or move to another state where they can receive assistance with their treatment. Southern Nevada residents who have been receiving chemotherapy treatments even without having health insurance coverage can kiss that privilege goodbye as the state’s largest public hospital had to stop providing outpatient oncology services.
“The scale of this is unprecedented,” said AARP Vice President Elaine Ryan, who has spent nearly three decades working on health policy at the state and federal level. “I really have never seen anything like this.” You can bet things are bad when someone who is the vice president of the nation’s largest advocacy group for the elderly speaks so grimly. States just cannot afford to pay for the bills they’ve racked up providing a variety of different health services to their citizens.
photo credit: Iangatos
Tags: economy, health care cost, health care cuts, health care funding, health care funds, obama, recession, state budget cuts, state health coverage, uninsured
April 8th, 2009 at 11:57 pm
[...] A depression is a bad time to get cancer, especially if you’re counting on someone else to pay for treatment. Read all about it in The MedHealth Blog. [...]
December 29th, 2009 at 4:05 am
Our country had been so much affected by this Economic Recession. there are lots of job cuts and company shutdowns. We are seeing some signs of economic recovery right now and we hope that it would continue.