Three-year limit on Medicaid benefits undue hardship

Kansas’s efforts to punch holes in the safety net program Medicaid were blocked Monday by officials who said they would have been too punitive.

Kansas had sought a three-year lifetime limit on the benefits that ensure children, the poor, elderly, and the disabled can receive medical care.

We are one of five states — Wisconsin, Maine, Arizona and Utah — to request the lifetime limit for Medicaid, the program that Gov. Jeff Colyer renamed and revamped as KanCare when he was lieutenant governor under Sam Brownback.

The lifetime limits would have affected only those that KanCare deemed eligible to hold down a job, about 12,000 of the 400,000 Kansans that depend on the state/federal assistance.

In an address Monday before the American Hospital Association, Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, said she was determined that Medicaid “remain a safety net for those that need it most,” and that it was important to recognize that “sometimes people’s circumstances change” and that Medicaid should continue to be a fallback if that happens.

Kansas already is at the bottom of the nation in terms of Medicaid benefits. Currently, a family of three can make no more than $7,760 a year to qualify for assistance.

The other shoe positioned to drop is Kansas’s request to enforce work requirements for those deemed able to do so in some fashion.

Of the four states that have been granted the work waiver — New Hampshire, Indiana, Arkansas and Kentucky — all have expanded Medicaid, which provides benefits for those earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $28,180 for a family of three — almost four times the benefits that Kansas extends.

KANSAS IS disturbingly punitive to the poor.

At 6.5 percent, we have the second-highest sales tax on food in the nation.

Rather than try to roll that back, legislators last weekend seriously debated another round of tax cuts that would primarily benefit the wealthy.

In essence, there’s no effort to make the playing field more equal between the rich and the poor.

That’s not good stewardship.