A few people have asked why I didn’t blog about the release of Rep Ryan’s House Budget Committee poverty report that came out on Monday. I did tweet this Monday:

Quick read of the health care chapter (p103-124) of GOP Poverty report is mostly one sided + incomplete lit review http://t.co/xoX9U25zlX

— Don Taylor (@donaldhtaylorjr) March 3, 2014

and this

For example: Medicaid section, the phrase Dual Eligible only appears once! Ignores ground zero of cost+qual problems http://t.co/xoX9U25zlX

— Don Taylor (@donaldhtaylorjr) March 3, 2014

I didn’t blog about it because the Medicaid portion of the document is really quite bad given that the report was hyped as the precursor to a major policy push by Rep Ryan and House Republicans. It is essentially a poorly done annotated bibliography that would get about a C- in my intro U.S. health system course. The biggest problem with the Medicaid portion of the document is not even the one-sided summary of the literature that is cited that could be forgiven in such a document, but ignoring the issue of the dual eligibles almost completely in something that is meant to set up the need for Medicaid reform is quite a big miss. So, the document is not serious enough on the Medicaid issue to warrant much blogging time.

I didn’t read the remainder of the report (on other federal poverty programs) after looking at the Medicaid parts. Here is a blog tag on the many things I have written about the dual eligibles and the need for reform.

cross posted at freeforall