As Salvatore LoGrande fought cancer and all the pain that came with it, his daughters promised to keep him in the white, pitched roof house he worked so hard to buy all those decades ago.
So, Sandy LoGrande thought it was a mistake when, a year after her father’s death, Massachusetts billed her $177,000 for her father’s Medicaid expenses and threatened to sue for his home if she didn’t pay up quickly.
“The home was everything,” to her father said LoGrande, 57.
But the bill and accompanying threat weren’t a mistake.
Rather, it was part of a routine process the federal government requires of every state: to recover money from the assets of dead people who, in their final years, relied on Medicaid, the taxpayer-funded health insurance for the poorest Americans.
This month, a Democratic lawmaker proposed scuttling the “cruel” program altogether. Critics argue the program collects too little — roughly 1% — of the more than $150 billion Medicaid spends yearly on long-term care. They also say many states fail to warn people who sign up for Medicaid that big bills and claims to their property might await their families once they die.
Insurance is designed to give people peace of mind against life’s many what-ifs.
What if my house burns down? It’s not likely but I have insurance to cover the cost of rebuilding it and replacing my stuff. What if get into a car crash? It’s not likely, but I have insurance to cover the cost of repairing or replacing my car and (depending on fault) the other vehicles involved in the crash. What if I need medical care? This is not something that insurance is really designed to handle, and the entire American health care system has twisted itself around this fucked up premise. We don’t need to nationalize health insurance, we need to abandon the idea that going to the doctor for routine care is something that you need insurance to pay for.