The Death of Missouri Medicaid

[usregimechange]

The death of Medicaid in Missouri is approaching. In its place will be something accurately called Missouri Healthnet, a net designed primarily to continue to prevent access to health coverage for the thousands that have lost it. But, what is more important is how we got here.

I was attempting to explain to several customers at a local business how individuals with mental illness can not just “pull themselves up by their boot straps.” I was unsuccessful in my attempt as they looked at me as if I had just morphed into an alien.

To ask a person with a major mental illness to stop making poor decisions is similar to asking a 4 year old to act like an adult. Just as getting mad when people with disabilities are a little distractive at a movie theater, these responses demonstrate not just a lack of compassion but primarily a lack of understanding.

If our parents never facilitated our maturity by consistently applying consequences and rewards, what would our developmental age be? If our parents never told us “no” and allowed us to learn through thousands of repetitions to control our emotions and a delay our gratification how many poor decisions would we make? If instead we were beat and ignored with zero predictability and placed in environments without even safety, our ability to make good choices may have been damaged.

The next time we think we see and reduce mental illness to laziness and immorality, what we may be seeing are those qualities within ourselves. When we use the ideology of judgementalism, conservatism and self-righteousness to rationalize our indifference, we may realize that our awareness of it was only possible as a direct result of OUR hands being open and empty.

[Erika]

1. Reagan is the one who dumped the mentally ill from health centers

and into the populace. He despised them. I always thought his Alzheimers disease may have been his comeuppance. He didn't ask for that just like no one asks for mental illness. He was treated with kid gloves, but he tossed the mentally ill onto the streets, without a second thought. I think he got a payback.

[Wapsie B]

2. Yes he sure did.

We decimate the mental healthcare system in this country and then sit in shock and horror when someone slaughters 33 people at VT wondering how could such a thing happen?

[usregimechange]

3. Matt Blunt would make Reagan proud

[silverojo]

4. You took the words right out of my modem

And it's not just Ronnie who paid the price for being callous...his jackal wife, Nancy (a/k/a Pennywise The Clown in "It") suffered even more, watching her hubby deteriorate over the years.

My only regret is that the rotten son of a bitch wasn't tossed out onto the street, the way he did with the mentally ill in the 1980's.

[Erika]

5. Yep n/t

[usregimechange]

6. I didn't pay attention to politics then but no surprise there...

[hadrons]

7. Read this from 2005 ....

GERSTER, Mo. - Gary Ruckel, like most rural Missourians, backed Matt Blunt for governor last fall and voted other Republicans into legislative seats.

Ruckel agreed with Blunt on issues such as gun control and gay marriage, but he was not considering a subject that hit much closer to home: medical care.

So when Blunt proposed cuts in Medicaid last month that could cost Ruckel and his wife, Vivian Ruckel, some services, the couple had second thoughts about backing Republicans.

"It kind of jumps back and kicks you in the teeth, is what it does, because I wasn't planning on this," said Ruckel, who lives about 50 miles north of Springfield. "If they cut back on Medicaid, it's going to crucify us, because we don't make that much."

Ruckel's story is familiar in rural Missouri. More than half of Medicaid recipients in Missouri live outside the Kansas City and the St. Louis areas.

....

Ruckel and his wife, both 64, said they were among those in need. Ruckel, a former police officer and prison guard, has emphysema, arthritis, a spinal defect and other ailments. His wife is in worse shape, suffering heart and lung ailments, and kidney disease. She tires quickly and cannot do much outside the home. Ruckel is on nine medications; his wife is on 21.

With a combined income of $1,357 a month, mostly from Social Security, they qualify for full payment of medical and pharmacy bills through Medicaid. Both are classified as workers with disabilities because Ruckel works on lawn mowers and his wife does sewing, making about $60 a month combined, he said.

....

http://www.tilrc.org/docs/0205mocuts.htm