12/26/08-TWD's Agenda For The Weekend, Friday Edition: States Continue Painful Cutbacks on Medicaid

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America's health care woes continue.

From Washington Post writer Amy Goldstein (with contribution from Chris Jenkins, Lisa Rein, and Nikita Stewart), a chilling story today about states across the country cutting back their Medicaid program.

You can think the Bush Recession again for more valuable statistics added to the legacy.

With revenue falling at the same time that more people are losing their jobs and private health coverage, states already have pared their programs and many are looking at deeper cuts for the coming year. Already, 19 states -- including Maryland and Virginia -- and the District of Columbia have lowered payments to hospitals and nursing homes, eliminated coverage for some treatments, and forced some recipients out of the insurance program completely.

In this article, good news is harder to find than good work (or in actual reality right now, any work, but it comes here in this paragraph:

According to a Washington source who is in close contact with lawmakers, some in Congress also are beginning to entertain the idea of allowing unemployed people who have lost health benefits to sign up for Medicaid, with federal money paying the entire bill.

However, Florida won't pay the bill for older adolescents and new mothers sadly:

Nineteen states and the District have cut Medicaid for the current fiscal year, according to a survey this month by Families USA, a liberal consumer health lobby. All but one, plus six other states, are drafting deeper reductions for the coming fiscal year that they hope to avoid. Florida's Medicaid officials have just handed the governor and legislature a blueprint for a 10 percent reduction; it would eliminate coverage for 7,800 18- and 19-year-olds and 6,800 pregnant women.

And not a surprise that the disgrace that is Lindsay Graham is allowing his state to do this:

In South Carolina, Medicaid officials last week announced the third round of cuts since August. They are "real unpleasant stuff," said Jeff Stensland, spokesman for the state's Department of Health and Human Services. The program will stop paying for most dental care for adults, eliminate nutritional supplements, cut home-delivered meals from 14 a week to seven, curtail mental health counseling, stop building wheelchair ramps and pay for fewer breast and cervical cancer screenings.

And you'll shake your head at the letter Edna McCain, a founder of a hospice hospital in the state, received in the mail. It this isn't a paradigm of how troubling this news is, I don't know what is?

Edna McClain, founder of Hospice Care of Tri-County in Columbia, S.C., helped coax state health officials to expand Medicaid to cover nursing care and other support for dying patients in the mid-1990s.

She was stunned this month when an e-mail arrived from South Carolina's Department of Health and Human Services informing her that as of Jan. 1, Medicaid no longer would pay for new hospice patients. And after March 31, it would stop covering most people on Medicaid already in hospice care.

I'll let you go ahead and read her noble attempt at trying to prevent a decision that she is nevertheless powerless to stop.

So many spots to be in disgust with when reading this. From the cutbacks on coverage for old teenagers and pregnant women to the neglect of folks in their potentially macabre stages, it is getting uglier by the day with health care in America.

At what point will "enough" truly be "enough"?

(The Pending Schedule will be in the comments section at 3:40 PM)