In an exchange stretched with Senator Bill Cassidy, Louisiana Republican, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. showed a surprising lack of familiarity with medicate and Medicaid, the government programs responsible for the coverage of over 150 million Americans.
Sometimes, Mr. Kennedy seemed to confuse the two programs. Medicare is a federal program that provides coverage to older and more disabled Americans, while Medicaid is a state federal program that covers low -income people.
When he described medicate for the first time, he seemed to ignore half of the medicine program that is based on private insurance plans to provide assistance. Later, he recognized that he had been enrolled in a private plan of Advantage to medicate and said he thought that “more people would prefer to be for the benefit of medicating because it offers very good services”.
The plans to medicate Advantage have been strongly criticized by the legislators, also by the federal regulators that Kennedy would supervise if confirmed and by public defense groups. They accused the plans, including those offered by the largest nation insurers, of overloading the government, of delaying and denying access to care. The regulators penalized some insurers for the excess of motorcyclists.
Kennedy described Medicaid as “fully paid by the Federal Government”. In fact, Medicaid, which provides health insurance coverage to almost 80 million low -income Americans, is financed through a combination of state and federal funds.
Kennedy also said that many members of Medicaid were frustrated by the high costs they face with their public insurance coverage.
“Most of the people who are on Medicaid are not happy,” said Kennedy. “The prizes are too high. The franchises are too high.”
He repeated a similar discussion further in the hearing, in front of the Senator Ben Ray Lujan, a democratic of New Mexico. “The prizes are too high, the franchises are too high and everyone gets sick,” he said.
But the vast majority of Medicoid members does not pay prizes or deductibles for their coverage. The federal law specifically forbids the prizes for low -income medicoid members. Patients generally do not have to pay anything when they go to the doctor, apart from a handful of state experiments that have tested small commissions.
Recent research on Medicaid do not support Kennedy’s thesis that “everyone is getting sick”. Studies generally discover that an increase in medicaid enrollment improves people’s access to health care. Some studies have also discovered that Medicaid improves health results, although it is a more limited research corpus.
Senator Cassidy asked Mr. Kennedy to describe how the Medicaid program would have reformed. While other candidates for Trump offered concrete policy proposals – Russell Vought, the candidate to manage the budget and management office, suggested a job requirement for the program in his confirmation hearing last week – Kennedy described i changes of vaguer.
He said he supported the changes to the increase in transparency “and” increase responsibility “.
When Mr. Cassidy pushed him to be more specific, Mr. Kennedy replied: “I don’t have a wide proposal to dismantle the program”.
Mr. Kennedy seemed prepared, however, to ask for data on the registrations for Medicaid, accurately telling senators that the program covers about 72 million people through the traditional public insurance program and another seven million through a targeted benefit, health insurance For children program.