Category Archives: Lottery

GOP health care fix has weird fixation on lottery winners

The Republican Party’s plan to repeal and replace Obamacare suggests that lottery winners are the real reason health care costs are so high.

The GOP finally made good on its seven-year promise to repeal and replace former President Obama’s Affordable Care Act by releasing the American Health Care Act (AHCA). The main selling point of the new bill, according to current President Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer, is its diminutive size, weighing in at a light 67 pages. (Easy to pick up with extremely small hands, we presume.)

Weirdly, over 10% of those pages deal with one very specific way to reduce the costs of Medicaid, the government program that subsidizes health care for people of limited means. Yep, a full seven pages of the bill that was seven years in the making are devoted to denying Medicaid benefits to anyone lucky enough to win a significant lottery jackpot.

Under the header ‘Letting States Disenroll High Dollar Lottery Winners’ – the very first item under the ‘Reducing State Medicaid Costs’ section – the AHCA proposes that anyone who wins up to $80k be excluded from Medicaid coverage for one month. The timeout rises incrementally by one month for each additional $10k won, topping out at a 10-year exclusion for winnings of $1.26m. The AHCA also authorizes states to “intercept” gambling windfalls to recover Medicaid benefits furnished to the individual who had the audacity to win while gambling.