Hot Meals For This Yinzer

In a bit of irony, a health system is hiring the very people at risk of losing Medicaid benefits next year.  In Allegheny County Pennsylvania, there are about 233,000 people on Medicaid and a state official thinks the new federal requirements mean some 26,000 of them will lose coverage starting in January, and many will lose ability to afford medications and avoid hospital emergency care. But the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is trying to prevent a crisis, having hired about 12,000 people on Medicaid so far as part of a work pathway program, including for roles supporting nurses, pharmacists and boots on the ground clinical care, according to Brendan Harris, who heads up UPMC's Medicaid managed care plan.  Think about that - the very policy intended to raise the requirements for Medicaid benefits is prompting creativity in staffing the very people at risk. In a bit of truth being stranger than fiction, one of those hires, Michael, 59, from former steel town Braddock PA near Pittsburgh, is going to be cooking hot medically tailored meals, including ones for my aunt who has lived in the steel city for 35 years. My Aunt, a retired librarian born in the mountains of Naples Italy, who grew up in Patterson New Jersey' eastside district, a former Giants fan turned Steelers "Yinzer," is now 92, living alone at home--trying to "hold off death with a broomstick" as she likes to tell me with a smile. Michael, who's struggled for years with odd jobs and a spat of hip surgeries, says he's doing the cooking program because "he has no choice" to keep the healthcare benefits, but "I hope it helps folks a little bit too."  Like Andy Dufresne said famously in Shawshank Redemption, "Remember, Red," he said, "Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies."