Executive summary: Medicaid in California is handled by Medi-Cal (because God save us from bureaucrats who think that they have a sense of humor). Medi-Cal is, in a word, horrible. Also: evil, vicious, nasty, obnoxious, and downright dangerous to one’s health and well-being. So far, so unsurprising. What’s happening now though is that there’s a lawsuit that seeks to prove that Medi-Cal is also racist against Latinos because it can take forever to find a doctor that will actually accept Medi-Cal and its extremely small reimbursement rates, and the doctors who do aren’t usually the ones that can handle the more difficult cases and conditions.  Users of Medi-Cal are mostly Latinos, there’s a disparity in care, federal anti-discrimination law, you can follow along.

This is, of course, deeply ironic: because probably the people who put together Obamacare don’t want to shove Medi-Cal patients in a box somewhere and forget about the box because those patients are Latino.  That’s absurd.  No, Obamacare is designed to file and forget those people because Medi-Cal patients are poor.

I mean, this is what Medicaid is for. It’s to hide poor people away where they won’t disturb the delicate sensibilities of your average bicoastal progressive.  There’s a reason why they keep the reimbursement rates so low; the idea isn’t to actually give poor people access to health care. It’s to give poor people access to health care insurance. Do the latter, and the aforementioned bicoastal types won’t worry their compassionate-tilted little heads over what happens next to the poor people who now have access to ‘insurance’ that nobody actually wants to take.

And now you know why so many Republican governors refused outright to expand Medicaid. Call us all starry-eyed dreamy romantics if you like, but the GOP has a real problem with condescendingly grinding down poor people. And that’s what this is: advocating the expansion of Medicaid is advocating a willingness to take poor people and, again, shove them into a box because it’s easier than thinking and lets you still sleep at night out of sheer self-delusion.

Moe Lane

PS: There’s no more money for Medi-Cal. That is the bedrock problem right now for proponents of that program; there’s no more money at the state level, and the feds have their own problems with Obamacare right now, too. So it’s interesting to see what a lawsuit will actually accomplish. Because. There’s no more money.