Achieving Meaningful Access to Medicaid

Abstract

Federal and state budgetary constraints continually challenge Medicaid. The effects of benefit cuts are common: long waiting lists for community-based services, skeletonized drug formularies with unstable access to long-term prescriptions, no psychiatric therapy for people immobilized by depression, and no more than fourteen days of acute hospitalization. Reimbursements may be so low that providers cannot hire qualified staff and must reduce services, close facilities, or refuse to take Medicaid altogether. Misguided efficiency policies may afflict some groups of patients as well. Decisions to narrow access rights to publicly funded health care promote the perception that more broadly inclusive programs would be unwisely and unfairly generous. They also risk characterizing disability rights as "special," confined to a narrow class of people who charitably ought not to be expected to provide for themselves. In contrast, on a philosophical view we have been exploring-one that addresses problems of justice under circumstances of injustice by pursuing rather than reducing inclusion-efforts like these are unjust.