How Medicaid Coverage Can Fall Short For Americans With Disabilities

The last four years have produced historic debates over the nature of America’s health care safety net. But Medicaid — a state-federal partnership program that serves some of the sickest, poorest, most overlooked Americans — is still in need of serious reforms when it comes to its approach toward covering Americans with special health care needs.
Federal requirements for the populations and services that states must cover under their Medicaid programs are currently broken up into “mandatory” and “optional” categories — misleading characterizations that have nothing to do with the actual medical or financial realities of the Americans these broad generalizations claim to encapsulate.