Medicaid Benefits Cut in Arizona for Kids in Low Income Families

The Children’s Health Insurance Program (C.H.I.P.) has been eliminated by the state of Arizona: the first of the fifty states to do so.

The Governor of the state, Jan Brewer, signed this year’s state budget which puts an end to the existing KidsCare program: a program that at one time supplied dental and medical coverage for as many as 38 thousand low income families.

The program officially ends in mid-June which will leave these families without adequate coverage for dental and medical care.

The organization Oral Health of America finds this move a travesty and a representative from the organization explained that by removing such coverage, the government will wind up paying for this move in other ways: in emergency rooms and in critical care units.

Cutting coverage is not going to make the need for dental treatment disappear; people will simply wait until they are experiencing pain and for the condition to worsen before they seek out treatment.

Apparently, due to a shortfall of funding, the state cannot afford to continue the program.

The signed budget will also play a big role in the treatment that low income adults get too.

Come September, all adults will lose Medicaid coverage for dental treatments.

Adults that do not have coverage will avoid going to the dentist until they have infections and pain. If treated in a hospital setting, the infection will be treated, the pain will be temporarily addressed, but nothing will be done about the underlying dental issue.

Eventually, all of this will lead to greater hospital offsets which are subsequently passed on to other hospital patients in the way of increased hospitalization costs.

It is now hoped that the passage of the healthcare reform will help low income Arizonians regain the very vital dental coverage that every individual requires.