No. of Recommendations: 8
> I have seen Medicaid nursing homes, too. Visited people from church that were in ones.
Perhaps. But no safety net is not pretty. Perhaps the bridge abutment idea works for some, but for others a medicaid nursing home is less unattractive than raw, unmitigated poverty of the elderly.
It's like childhood vaccines. We've been culturally insulated from the consequences for so long that society has collectively forgotten that 20% of children died before the age of 5 in the United States about 100 years ago. There was a slightly large impact post-1965 Medicare/Medicaid's impact on mortality and financial stress on seniors.
Just because something is bad doesn't mean removing it can't make things much worse.
