The Medical (Medicaid) program definitely met and still meets a lot of the needs of its beneficiaries but there’s more progress that can be done. Medicaid met and still meets the needs through serving millions of people with low-income. Medicaid and the Children’s Health insurance program so far provided coverage for more than 31 million of children and based on 2014 Report of CMS, about 72.5 million of people enrolled (CMS, 2014). Even though the federal government can set minimum guidelines for their eligibility in Medicaid, a lot of states are actually free to choose to expand even more than the minimum threshold allows. According to data from Kaiser Family Foundation after Affordable Care Act went into effect, 34% of people in enrolment …show more content…
That also includes helping these pregnant women who might need help when it comes to prenatal care, labor, and delivery and also after she gives birth if she might need help. It has Medicaid is also one the largest payers for helping with mental health services and helping with services that deal with people who have substance of use disorders. There has been around twelve million visits to the hospital emergency departments in 2007 that took care of individuals with behavioral health disorders, abuse substance issues and also mental disorders (CMS). There is a law that came out not too long ago which is called “Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act” which allowed millions of Medicaid beneficiaries to participate in managed care organizations (CMS). That helped a lot of people with different kind of disorders to have a protection against any sorts of discrimination practices and doesn’t allow insurances companies to limit coverage for them which is great. It definitely can be seen that Medicaid (Medical) is doing a lot to help to make sure people are safe and the little details are met in their daily lives if they are truly focusing on a certain area. Recent achievement of Medical program show in expansion, immigrant inclusion, and more …show more content…
Based on a report by Edwards (2010) it has been clear that the federal costs will exceed $100 billion dollars by 2020. That itself presents a huge problem to the overall population. Policy makers need to turn their direction in opposite way and try to restructure Medicaid to be able to control the huge costs we have. One way to do that would be to turn a program into a block grant. That would provide a certain amount for each state. Block granting in 1996 was one of the approaches that the welfare reform took (Edwards, 2010). That would help the state to shorten the Medicaid programs, also to deal with any kind of abuse or fraud and most importantly would help all of us to build more resourceful and cost effective health care resolutions. But block grant may not be everything that would help us avoid issues. As Owcharenko (2012) talks about goals of improvement she mentions that to reform Medicaid we need to mainstream families into more private health insurance options. If Medicaid dollars would stay with the individuals they would still be able to have same choices in coverage but then also be able to take action in private market just