Thursday, March 5, 2015

Walker budget upends Long-Term-Care patients; private insurers' win

Here we go again - - another Walker surprise, 'because-I-can' budget bombshell - - this one upending thousands of families utilizing in-home Long Term Care assistance and routing some to out-of-state private insurance providers:
Gov. Walker’s proposed budget would change the way thousands of Wisconsin families get care for an elderly loved one, or a member with disabilities.
Participants could lose relationships and possibly their doctors under the proposed Family Care overhaul, according to Kit Kerschensteiner, an attorney with the group Disability Rights Wisconsin. 
“If your doctor that you have now isn’t part of that network, doesn’t choose to become part of that network or isn’t approved in that network then you will be…sounds like, it appears…that you would be changing your doctor,” Kerschensteiner says. 
Kerchensteiner says Wisconsin’s long-term care system was set up to include regional managers who could remain in close contact with the people they serve. She fears those management organizations won’t be able to offer all the benefits the new model promises, and meet all the new regulations. 
“It’ll be a whole new ball game. It seems likely that there would be out-of-state national kinds of insurance entities that would come in and fill that void,” she says. 
Kerchensteiner hopes lawmakers put the brakes on plans to redesign Wisconsin’s long-term care programs, so stakeholders can get together and brainstorm improvements.
Another media account says the Long-Term-Care community was "blind-sided" by the Walker budget item.

Remember when he said at a recent presidential campaign event before the Club For Growth's one-percenters he believed in the total privatization of Medicaid?

Add another group to the long list of those he has disrespected in Wisconsin for political reasons.

And, again, like the UW makeover, the recasting of the Natural Resources Board to advisory status, the suspension of the Stewardship fund and a host of other fundamental policy changes - - all dumped into a 2,000 page and complex budget document with the public essentially unprepared.

He set the pattern with Act 10 - - a fundamental default to deceit.

Walker '16? Shudder the thought.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

All of the bombs launched at Wisconsin working citizens, actually economic terrorism, make Scott Walker and ideal president!

What America needs is more austerity for the masses, more give-aways and reagonomics for multinational corporations and billionaires.

Everyone else, get out your umbrella because "trickle down" is just a nice way to say the wealthy are urinating on you.

And not having the courage to, you know, actually run on the divisive policies you intend to enact so that the public is surprised?

BRILLIANT!

Let the circus begin. Stand in awe as the media catapults this man into the White House (remember, W stole TWO elections!).

Lynne Harwood said...

Anon, your right. Like a monkey on the zoo's Monkey Island throwing feces at the children that have come to see primates, Scott Walker is flinging excrement in the form of economic terrorism across the badger state.

Many may wonder why this monkey throws feces at people, but those that are the target of his flying poo don't need to know why. Crap is raining down on them and there is no relief in sight.

This Walker monkey has an endless supply of excrement to toss because he doesn't actually excrete it all. He gets feces from his wealthy out-of-state donors.

Calling this divide and conquer is less accurate than acknowledging that this monkey is hurling his feces unchecked.

Like an adolescent vandal that paints graffiti and vandalizes because he can and he is encouraged to do so by others. In this case, shilling for out-of-state billionaires.

Those union folks that voted for him time and time again deserve to be pelted and then covered with feces. This is what they asked for.

The rest of us are going to pay a heavy price for the stoooopidity of Wisconsin's working class.

Can someone please explain to me why some mistakenly claim our public schools are any good?

Wisconsin's biggest problem, evidently, is massive brain drain. Those that can read and think for themselves leave the state so they don't have to spend the rest of their lives hanging around with folks that worship grifters.

Evidently, those that are left are so poorly educated, so functionally illiterate, and so innumerate that when they are pelted with monkey poo they think monkey Walker is throwing roses.

Anonymous said...

JER -

When I think of Walker and his GOP sheep legislators, I am reminded of this old poem (source anonymous):

I watched them tearing a building down, a gang of men in a busy town.

With a ho heave ho and a lusty yell, they swung a beam and a sidewall fell.

And I asked the foremen, “Are these men skilled, as those you'd hire if you were to build?”

He laughed and said, “Oh, no indeed! Just a common labor is all I need.

"I can easily wreck in a day or two, what it took skilled men years to do.”

I asked myself as I went my way,
Which of these roles have I tried to play?

Am I a builder who works with care, measuring life with rule and square?

Or am I a wrecker who walks the town, content with the labor of tearing down?