She’s not pushed to Medicaid. Her financially secure parents can buy insurance for her, if they want to, and it sounds like they do want to. If her parents decide to cut her loose, then I hope she lives in an expansion state because she’ll have to get Medicaid.
I’m not talking about the individual case – I am talking about the big picture that the Congress & government agencies are looking at when they set the rules and the process for reporting changes in income. Most people don’t fluctuate back and forth between being independent and dependent – so that’s not a problem that will come up often. The more frequent problem is fluctuations in income as people change jobs, life circumstances change, and income status changes. For people living on the margins of the poverty line, the requirement to report all changes of income could result in a person’s insurance changing multiple times in a year as their income rises and falls above the medicaid cutoff. It makes no sense for a person to be shunted back and forth repeatedly between two systems – so from a policy perspective, it makes more sense for people to give a ballpark estimate, and report a change when they are certain that there has been and will continue to be a significant deviation.
I agree, calmom. We don’t want to cause even more disruption in the lives of people who are living on the edge of the poverty line.