Michael D. Tanner:
The good news, if you want to call it that, is that roughly 1.6 million Americans have enrolled in ObamaCare so far.
The not-so-good news is that 1.46 million of them actually signed up for Medicaid. If that trend continues, it could bankrupt both federal and state governments.
Medicaid is already America’s third-largest government program, trailing only Social Security and Medicare, as a proportion of the federal budget. Almost 8 cents out of every dollar that the federal government spends goes to Medicaid. That’s more than $265 billion per year.
Indeed, already Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid account for 48% of federal spending. Within the next few years, those three programs will eat up more than half of federal expenditures.
And it’s going to get worse. Congress has shown no ability to reform Social Security or Medicare. With ObamaCare adding to Medicare spending, we are picking up speed on the road to insolvency.
The Congressional Budget Office projects that, in part because of ObamaCare, Medicaid spending will more than double over the next 10 years, topping $554 billion by 2023.
And that is just federal spending.
State governments pay another $160 billion for Medicaid today. For most states, Medicaid is the single-largest cost of government, crowding out education, transportation and everything else.
New York spent more than $15 billion on Medicaid last year, roughly 30% of all state expenditures. The Kaiser Foundation projects that over the next 10 years, New York taxpayers will shell out some $433 billion for the program.
But none of these projections foresaw that so many of ObamaCare’s enrollees would be Medicaid eligible.
To be sure, the health-care law’s designers saw the expansion of Medicaid as an important feature of their plan to expand coverage for the uninsured. Still, they expected most of those enrolling in ObamaCare to qualify for private (albeit subsidized) insurance.
It’s beginning to look like that was just another miscalculation, one that could have very serious consequences for the program’s costs.
Moreover, any projection of Medicaid’s future cost to New York taxpayers assumes that the federal government keeps its promise to pay 100% of the cost for Medicaid’s expansion over the next three years and 90% thereafter. But given the growing burden that Medicare will put on a federal budget already facing high debt levels, how likely is it that changes in the federal share of Medicaid will stay off the table?
In fact, as part if last December’s fiscal-cliff negotiations, the Obama administration briefly considered changing to a “blended” reimbursement rate, somewhere between the current and promised rates. The administration quickly backed away from the offer, but it’s likely to come back in the future. If it does, it would cost New York tens of millions of dollars.
Every bit as bad as the cost is the fact that for all this money, recipients are going to get pretty lousy health care.
The Cloward/Piven strategy is continuing according to plan. Nor do they care who suffers so long as the system crashes.
When Michelle Obama pipped up that women over 50 should consider both Botx and plastic surgery, was she saying all these ladies on Obamacare/Medicare/Medicaid could actually get such treatments?
Talk about piling the Coward/Piven on thick!