Deliberately Bankrupt Medicaid to Bring About Socialized Health Care?

Cross-posted from the KeyWiki Blog.

Purposefully create economic chaos and de-stabilize millions of lives to pursue an ideological ideal?

Who would would propose such madness?

Chris Maisano would.

Chris Maisano is a leading member of the Young Democratic Socialists (youth wing of Democratic Socialists of America) . He is a member of the NYC DSA Economic Crisis Group, with socialist heavyweights such as Rob Saute, Karie Gubbins and Michael Hirsch.

Writing on the YDS website on March 22, Maisano explicitly called for a new application of the infamous Cloward-Piven Strategy. Maisano wants to overload Medicaid until it crashes, forcing the Federal government to assume full responsibility for all health care - in other words, socialized medicine. Maisano writes,

"With yesterday’s passage in the House of the Obama administration’s health care reform bill, it would seem at first glance that the movement for national, single-payer health insurance has been seriously derailed...
However, there are many serious flaws in the bill that will put single payer back on the political agenda sooner than we may think. The indispensable and indefatigable folks at Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) cataloged many of them in a press release earlier today, but they only briefly touch on an issue that I think could potentially be a central aspect of single-payer strategy in the coming years: Medicaid and the fiscal crisis of the states..."

Quentin Young and friend

Physicians for a National Health Program, is incidentally led by the father of the "single payer' movement, retired Chicago physician Quentin Young, personal friend and former doctor of Barack Obama and a leading member of Democratic Socialists of America.

"Under the plan that Congress will pass, about half of the roughly 30 million people that would gain access to health insurance coverage would be placed in Medicaid. Medicaid is funded jointly by the federal government and the states, but the combination of dwindling tax receipts and surging enrollment – an estimated 3.3 million people joined the program in the last year alone – has severely impaired the states’ ability to meet their Medicaid obligations. This has forced many states to cut Medicaid reimbursements to doctors, resulting in drastic hardships for many Medicaid recipients... Since state budgets are not expected to return to health any time in the foreseeable future, Medicaid expansion could potentially break the budgets of many states around the country..."

Maisano then goes on to invoke a revival of the Cloward-Piven Strategy, which was credited with almost bankrupting his hometown New York in the late 1970s... (Continue Reading)