Free insurance

Prior to Obamacare many poor people used the hospital emergency room as a type of health care. This is often reported in the news as it is costly. A wider view reveals a different story. Poor people were covered by Medicaid including those with preexisting conditions. Medicaid did not cover adults without children but another program known as Federally Qualified Health Centers did cover these adults without children. There is a health care safety net available to anybody regardless of ability to pay. There are 1,300 Federally Qualified Health Centers serving at least 24 million people a year. These centers offer medical care on a sliding fee scale, based on income, and are heavily dependent on Medicare and Medicaid – and they’ve been around for decades. When Obamacare came out it was 2,700 pages and the press people chose to accept the Presidents assurance that it would do all that he said. If they had investigated they would have discovered that everyone including those with preexisting conditions could get insurance and it was free for low income people and this was before Obamacare. It was just too much work to dig into the details when it was a program that sounded so good to most press people.