Imagine you are the breadwinner for a family of four, and have been out of work for a while in the recessionary economy. Your financial situation is so dire that you have had to enroll your family in Medicaid. Then you find a job, not one that will make you wealthy but one that pays a decent subsistence wage. That’s great news for your family except for one fact—you will no longer qualify for Medicaid. And your new employer does not provide health insurance. Fortunately, you will qualify for a federal subsidy through the new health insurance exchanges that are part of Obamacare.
Have you been saved by the federal safety net?
Yes and no, because you will first be stuck in what health policy experts call aninsurance churn, caught in “the Medicaid-exchange divide.” In the time between losing Medicaid and receiving insurance through the exchange, your family could be one serious illness away from financial calamity.
It is this churn that has some policy experts contending that Arkansas’s plan—to use its federal Medicaid dollars to purchase insurance for its low-income population on the exchanges—might be the key to helping people maintain more consistent healthcare coverage as their economic circumstances wax and wane… (Read more and view comments at Forbes)
