Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness: this is what U.S. citizens are promised. Surely how healthy a person is has a great affect on all three parts of this promise. Health care has been a huge topic of debate these days, and the phrase Health Care Reform is met with disdain by many. With so many Americans worrying about health care, the possibility of even more people being forced to say goodbye to their health insurance is frightening.
On Aug. 25, Wisconsin’s GOP candidates running for governor, Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker and former U.S. Representative Mark Neumann, met for their final debate before the primary election. Both Walker and Neumann said that they had plans to cut the BadgerCare Plus program, as reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
BadgerCare Plus is Wisconsin’s health care program for the poor, disabled, and elderly. Currently, more than 770,000 Wisconsin residents are covered by the BadgerCare Plus program. During the debate, Walker claimed the BadgerCare Plus program was “supposed to be a temporary safety net.”
Let’s just start with how wrong that statement is. BadgerCare and its Plus program have never had any particular time limits.
Former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson created the BadgerCare program in 1997 as a way for low-income families to have health care for as long as they could not receive health insurance through an employer. For those in low-income jobs, there are more than likely not many opportunities to get health insurance other ways.
If you’ve ever had to bus tables, you probably realize that there aren’t a lot of benefits that come along with the job. No paid vacation time, no health coverage, and certainly no dental. For some, working as a cashier or waitress may just be a temporary job, perhaps a way to pay tuition bills in college. But others aren’t so lucky as to be able to go to college, and for them, having to ask “Would you like the soup or salad” might not be temporary at all.
Walker also said that the BadgerCare Plus program has “brought forth all sorts of fraud and abuse.” I wonder what sort of fraud and abuse he is talking about.
Having signed up for BadgerCare Plus myself, I can tell you that the application process is grueling. Only a specific group of people are at all eligible to receive BadgerCare Plus benefits. In order to apply for the program, you must be an adult between the ages of 19-64 and your income cannot excede $1,805 per month. If you are able to receive health insurance from an employer, you may as well not start your application.
If you don’t meet the standards for receiving BadgerCare, your application is easily denied. It took about three months of my paperwork being looked at and over $4 in postage stamps for me to be able to receive health insurance.
The CDC has found that more than 46 million Americans are without health insurance. Without BadgerCare, there would be nearly a million more. One of the number one priorities of the state of Wisconsin should be to have its people healthy. Cutting the BadgerCare Plus program would be a way to move in the opposite direction.
