California: 80% of Medicaid Payouts Go to Non-Whites

More than 80 percent of all Medi-Cal—California’s version of the pre-Obamacare Medicaid social healthcare program designed for people who cannot afford healthcare—is paid out for nonwhites, it has emerged.

News of the racial discrepancy in Medi-Cal usage was hidden in the reporting over a new court case which claims that the reimbursement rates to doctors are so law that that in effect lead to poorer healthcare for nonwhites.

According to a report on the PEW Charitable Trusts titled “Are Medicaid’s Payment Rates So Low They’re Discriminatory?” the government of California is now being sued by the “Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund” (in other words, a racially-based Hispanic pressure group*) which says “the state’s low payment rates to doctors lead to poor care for the largely Hispanic beneficiaries that use Medicaid.”

The court case is “novel,” the article adds, because of the tactic of accusing the state of “racial discrimination in order to increase funding.”

Read the rest at The New Observer.