On 8/31 cuts were made to Commonwealth Care causing 31,000 legal immigrants to lose health care coverage.
On October 1st they will be enrolled in CeltiCare, but in the meantime they are being covered by Health Safety Net.
The problem is that there is a myriad of services not covered by Health Safety Net including outpatient non-urgent services. Which means chemotherapy, dialysis, and other important therapies can not be paid for. In many cases, this will mean termination of therapies until Oct. 1.
Fortunately for the percentage of my patients that these changes effect, they have someone to go to bat for them. Administrators at BHCHP are willing to work with the Office of Medicaid and Commonwealth Care to try to cover treatments on a case by case basis until the transition period is over.
Hopefully they will be successful. It's one more reason why I love where I work, the fact that people are consistently ready to go above and beyond to advocate for every person's right to health care.
I worry about the people who don't have anyone to advocate for them. The young, or elderly or non English speaking or mentally impaired legal immigrants who are not part of our system. I hope their doctors are also speaking up for them. Everyone has a right to the care that they need.
And without getting any more political, that's all I have to say about that.
1 comment:
I'd love to sit down and have a full-on political discussion about this with you sometime. I see a lot of Commonwealth Care (and MassHealth) through the dental side of the program, and I'm on one of the ComCare plans myself (my plan type actually doesn't cover dental, however). It's been interesting to explore the plan from both sides — as a member and as an employee of a provider.
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