2024 - Medicaid/Nursing Home Crisis
Perhaps you have heard that the “fiscally responsible” Republicans controlling the Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA), the agency which administers Indiana’s Medicaid discovered a BILLION DOLLAR BUDGET SHORTFALL in December of 2023. About a quarter of that billion dollars ($270 million) came from the Republican SUPERMAJORITY taking money out of the Medicaid reserve which the Federal Government sends to the State to administer. The rest came from cost increases to nursing home care. Nursing homes have largely been purchased by the same corporations which have bought up our hospitals and clinics. They are demanding the same profits from nursing homes that they are from the hospitals, and therefore costs have risen sharply.
What the REPUBLICAN SUPERMAJORITY has proposed to do about this in the 2025 session is appalling, and I hope you voters are taking note of this. They are proposing to make it EASIER for nursing homes to TAKE YOUR PROPERTY before going onto Medicaid by eliminating a key protection for estates called the “living trust.” This is a legal protection which preserves your estate after having been there for five years so that you are able to pass what you have worked your entire life to earn may be passed down to your heirs. The Republican SUPERMAJORITY claims that this is unfair, and you should have to exhaust everything you own before going onto Medicaid. They claim that it isn’t in our “political DNA” to have the right to pass your estate on to your heirs. Apparently, they haven’t read John Locke, one of the British philosophers who came up with the idea of natural rights, to the extent that Thomas Jefferson quoted much of his work when writing the Declaration of Independence. Natural rights are the notion that we have equal access to life, liberty, and ESTATE. Your right to your estate IS OUR POLITICAL DNA!! Furthermore, what happens when a nursing home takes your property? If you are family farmer whose kids farm the ground now, do they lose their livelihood because the nursing home takes the property away? If you have a spouse still living in the home, do they become homeless because you had to go into a nursing home? This proposal is a temporary band-aid that does nothing to fix the overall issue of rising nursing home costs. Again, why are we not going after the problem instead of implementing a temporary fix that only hurts people? Please stand with me against this terrible proposal!!!
Here is a video of my opponent St Rep. JD Prescott and St Sen. Travis Holdman (covering Blackford and Jay Counties in the district) talking about what their plans for 2025:
