Medicaid

Have you ever written a love poem? Was it an ode to Medicaid?

Here’s a thoughtful and elegiac social media post from one of our wonderful legal advocates, Marina Kurakin:

I <3 Medicaid. I want to hug it and squeeze it for keeping me alive as a kid…

A letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune to correct a misstatement about Medicaid, from our former executive director, Ann Hilton Fisher.

I appreciated “Stakes High in State as Medicaid Retool Looms,” but want to correct a misleading impression left by Jonathan Ingram’s quote “people who gained coverage under Medicaid expansion have no disabilities keeping them away from the workforce or children to care for. It’s an issue of employment, not health insurance.”

Legal Council for Health Justice continued its Medicaid advocacy yesterday. Executive director Tom Yates presented “An Explanation of Consent Decrees,” before Illinois General Assembly’s Senate Human Services Committee chair Daniel Biss and senators Julie Morrison, Melinda Bush, William Delgado, and Mattie Hunter.

In an update to our earlier work in court, Tom noted that two consent decrees and an order from Judge Joan Lefkow state unequivocally that Illinois must make Medicaid payments without interruption or delay, despite the budget impasse. Another Aug. 31 court order additionally requires that the state of Illinois must provide, before September 2, 2015, an accounting of all such payments .

But the state has yet to comply.