Mind the Gap (In Our Medicaid Coverage)
Written and Illustrated by Roger Miller-Kim
“So, how the fuck am I supposed to get coverage?”
I couldn’t hear the response at the other end of the line over the sound of blood rushing to my head. Or maybe that the sound of wind whipping past as I fell into
The Gap.
The Medicaid coverage gap is the sort of health insurance limbo clown rule that could only exist in our uniquely evil, rapidly un-developing nation. Do you make too much money to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to access the ACA marketplace tax credits in your state? Do you make under an arbitrary threshold to even be considered for Medicaid at all? Have you gone back to school to pursue a degree in a collapsing art field in your thirties? Fuck you, you poor idiot — you live in The Gap now!
According to Kaiser, 1.4 million Americans fall into this gap across ten mostly Southern states. I’m relatively lucky as far as these things go, in that I don’t have any major health conditions that necessitate frequent care or medication (save for my Lexapro and Wellbutrin, shout ouuuut). But I know this can’t be the case for every one of the 1,399,999 other folks in The Gap. And, with the passing of Trump’s Big Ugly Fucking Nasty Murderous Bill that will be a death knell to our entire country’s rural health infrastructure, things look to only be getting worse.
During Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020, he promised to introduce a “public option” for Medicaid, which would have closed The Gap in the states that won’t do it themselves. However, after he won that election, maybe the holes in his brain were already present because he never mentioned it again. We have to stop letting these fucking people lie to our dumb, sick faces about this stuff.
I know this is supposed to be a funny newsletter, so let’s see if this qualifies as funny: after I swore at that poor woman from the Georgia marketplace on the phone, and after I was scammed into at least one fake “Medicaid Gap Assistance Plan,” my now-wife and I made the decision to get married, in large part so I could get onto her employer’s health insurance plan. Now, four years and a move to Virginia later, she is the one in grad school on Medicaid, and I can’t afford to put her on the plan I get at my full-time job.
Look, the bottom line is that all of this nonsense should have ended with COVID when it became apparent that tying health insurance to employment is a fucking catastrophe. Americans need universal healthcare yesterday, but it didn’t happen, and tomorrow’s not looking good either, and, for a deeply sick society, maybe that’s the funniest thing of all.
This was written and illustrated by Roger Miller-Kim (@r_edgar_hoover).