Health care bureaucracy seems deliberately messy

A disabled friend sent me the following email: “People are receiving letters directing them to apply for Medicare as their only option to the marketplace insurance they are now losing. If these low-income people do not qualify for the state subsidies for Medicare, they will find themselves without insurance: regular Medicare will not process new applications until July 2018. What’s more, a federal penalty for being without insurance — which they also cannot afford — will likely be imposed.

“Only after several phone conversations did someone at the [Department of Human Services] finally say that this was not a decision out of their hands made by the federal government, but rather a determination made by the state.

“While the poor and disabled scramble before a deadline to learn which, if any, subsidies they qualify for, and how much Medicare will deduct from their disability checks as part of the deal — the income and asset ceilings that spell out these eligibilities and premiums are wrongly stated online. I know this because a DHS agent on the phone read me information that contradicted the information I was looking at on an official website; she explained that those official figures were in fact wrong. They had not been updated since 2016.

“Being assured that one has accurate information is nearly impossible. As a result, many will apply believing they qualify for particular subsidies when they don’t, while others will not apply, believing they don’t qualify when they do — in each case leaving people uninsured as the result of being misled by the state.”

Bureaucratic nightmares are not new, but in this case they seem to be a deliberate attempt to punish the people least able to cope with tangled red tape, the poor and disabled.

It seems that it is OK to practice Genocide Lite just as long as everybody keeps saying “Merry Christmas” at the mall. CORALIE KOONCE Fayetteville