If only this were an easygoing show hosted by Stanley Tucci instead.
The Big Picture
- The show reveals that Medicaid exploits loopholes to deny urgent care, impacting low-income patients.
- John Oliver also discusses Medicaid focusing on catching fraud over providing care, neglecting its own patients.
-
Last Week Tonight
suggests that Medicaid prioritize patient care over fraud prevention.
Wouldn’t it be great if the world was a place in which there was so little to worry about that we got weekly episodes of a show featuring Stanley Tucci (The Devil Wears Prada) talking about Negronis? We all know how nice this would be, including Last Week Tonight host John Oliver. Unfortunately, we got the satire news show instead, and this week the focus was the kind of practices that Medicaid does in order to sabotage its own patients.
The lengthy main segment unveiled several instances in which Medicaid used loopholes to negate treatment or help to low-income patients. This includes some bizarre cases: A kid with leukemia that very obviously needs urgent care, a boy with cerebral palsy who Medicaid deemed not worthy of basic hygiene and a baby that was declared unborn even though it was very much alive.
These terrible scenarios are basic indicators that Medicaid is constantly looking for loopholes in order to use an approach that is as skeptic as possible to its patiens. The logic behind this is that the system needs to operate this way in order to spot frauds – which certainly do happen – but the problem is that this impacts the lives of people who need urgent care and have no way to pay thousands of dollars for it.
‘Last Week Tonight’ Remodels The Medicaid PSAs
One thing that can’t be denied is that some Medicaid PSAs are pretty creative (and slightly creepy), but Last Week Tonight noticed that the amount of information delivered in those PSAs are just not enough for its patients to pay attention to. For starters, the Medicaid terms change from state to state, and a talking peach distracts from these kinds of details. You’ll understand when you watch the main segment below.
While one solution that would completely overhaul the issues with Medicaid is universal health care, we can’t pretend that the U.S. is anywhere near that. One solution that John Oliver proposes is that Medicaid stopped putting so much effort into catching frauds. While that seems ludicrous, Last Week Tonight suggests that the numbers support it: While frauds amount to $900,000 in loss, funding a team that does the work to find those frauds sometimes costs more than $ 6 million. While Medicaid certainly thinks that this is worth paying, we can’t forget that this comes at the expense of people who are just trying to survive.
You can watch the main segment above.
Last Week Tonight With John Oliver
Former Daily Show host and correspondent John Oliver brings his persona to this weekly news satire program.
- Release Date
- April 27, 2014
- Cast
- john oliver , David Kaye
- Main Genre
- Talk Show
- Seasons
- 11
- Studio
- HBO
This article was originally published on collider.com