Low Income Subsidy in Medicaid Health Insurance

Running head: HEALTHCARE POLICY ISSUE
Healthcare Policy Issue
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1HEALTHCARE POLICY ISSUE
Low income subsidy
Health care in United States is accompanied with exorbitant costs for an increasing
population to meet the demands of care quality. The Medicaid insurance policy has a section
of low-income subsidy which allows medical beneficiaries to those individuals with low
income status. The Medicaid extra help program allows the individuals with low income
status to get benefit of paying for monthly premium, annual deductibles and health insurance
payments. The low income subsidy or (LIS) section under the Medicaid health insurance is
available to families with limited income and is included under the Medicaid Part D
prescription drug program (Decarolis, 2015). The individuals who are permissible under the
extra help program or LIS of Medicare still suffer from medical billing of prescription drugs;
it means that there is no coverage gap of drug prescriptions. The amount of paying subsidy
and premiums is dependent on the individual annual income as compared to the federal
poverty threshold.
Statistics
The Medicaid health insurance provides stability and trust for population, however,
40% of the Medicaid beneficiaries are having low income and they spend a significantly
higher percentage of their income on health care premiums. Therefore, these individuals are
at considerable risk of financial cost hardships. Only 56 percent of the low income population
has been covered under the Medicaid low income subsidy policy (LIS); approximate
estimation shows that one-third of that population are below the federal poverty threshold
which is less than $18000 annual income for an individual(Schoen et al., 2018).For the
families with low income status annually, the Medicaidprogram on annual health care
premium costs and the hospital deductible charges pose an exorbitant financial cost for these
people; this includes service costs of the physicians, medical drugs and related medical