Not sure what there is to say about that really. The non-fraudulent Medicaid population is mostly moms with kids, with the rest being the poorest and/or sickest people. In the Deep South between 60% and 80% of kids are Medicaid. I wish I could I could say this was invariably true that it is the most vulnerable population but it isn’t quite as I know too well from my day job, but it’s close. The people on Medicaid would be the ones, in principle, who have the hardest time affording it, putting aside fraud for the moment.

If it’s unaffordable for other people as well, that’s a bummer, and if we want to rework our social programs so that if people not in the program can’t afford it we should not make it available to people in the programs, I guess we could do that.

Thing is, if there’s a safety net on this, only Medicaid recipients can get it. Home health care is so expensive that the middle class can’t afford to pay out of pocket or for insurance.

My state started going through this five years ago.

I suspect a great deal has been hidden by a strategic choice of ellipsis. Clicked the link but the ellipsis is at the source.

Like any other health care, home health care is very expensive. Relatives of aged family members have the choice, they can pay for the care if they can afford it, they can do the care themselves and forgo paid employment, if they can afford it, or they can leave the aged family to take care of themselves.

There were very good intentions behind the decision to have Medicaid pay for this. If we believe in a social safety net at all, this is not an inappropriate use, provided that the guardrails against fraud had not been purposely dismantled, which they have been, and we all know why.

Not everyone believes there should be a social safety net, and they have powerful arguments. As for the good intentions, we know what is paved with those. Had there not been a desire to enable fraud, this would be no worse than any other social program and a bit better than most.

The care of aged people at home, and how that is to be paid for, is something that closely concerns all of us here, who either have aged people to help take care of or will be aged themselves and in need of care. Every dollar siphoned to fraud is a dollar not spent on care for aged people who need it, if we think that public dollars should be put to that purpose at all.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/medicaid-fraud-fears-grow-amid-massive-red-state-billing-spike-sector-also-plagued-minnesota-