Register editor
The saying, “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” is credited to Winston Churchill, prime minister of England during World War II. In Churchill’s case, he was referencing the unique opportunity to forge an alliance between England, the United States and Russia as the founders of the United Nations.
And though it’s a challenge to see any silver linings facing us today, the COVID-19 pandemic is shining the spotlight on some glaring deficiencies and the changes necessary to put us on more solid footing from here on out.
Specific to the virus, the U.S. healthcare system is failing Americans, and nowhere worse than Kansas.
For the third week of March, jobless claims in Kansas jumped from 1,820 to 23,925. The fourth week, that number more than doubled, to 55,428. For the year, unemployment claims have increased a whopping 3,554%.
For most, losing their jobs includes losing their health insurance, pushing the number of uninsured in Kansas to well over 200,000.
For the majority of those newly unemployed, there is no fallback for health insurance.
In Kansas, only the desperately poor qualify for Medicaid, the state/federal health insurance program.
To wit, a family of four must make less than $10,000 a year to qualify.
Were Kansas to join the majority of states and expand Medicaid, that same family could earn up to $35,535 and still qualify for assistance, which is based on a sliding scale.
Without that wider net, most of our working poor fall through. Either they make too much to qualify for assistance or far too little to be able to afford health insurance on their own.
Add the pandemic, and we have hundreds of thousands of Kansans finding themselves in desperate economic and health situations.
ON THE NATIONAL level, 30 million lack health insurance, most residing in the 13 states that, like Kansas, have yet to expand Medicaid, including Missouri, Texas, and the greater Southeast.
Pertaining to the pandemic, some of the states that have expanded Medicaid are seeing that its testing and treatment are included, which is what every state should do. According to health care experts, those who need to be hospitalized typically stay 10 days; those who need intensive care, 14 days.
For people without insurance, as well as those who lack adequate coverage, such treatment will incur exorbitant bills.
The worry, of course, is that those without insurance will try to avoid such a scenario, endangering not only their personal health, but in the case of this highly contagious virus, those of others.
