Posts Tagged ‘Medicaid’
In the News
March 1, 2010Video: Obamacare is Entitlement Expansion, not Entitlement Reform
One of the best kept dirty little secrets of Obamacare is that over half of the health insurance expansion obtained by Americans through the bill is accomplished by putting them on the welfare program Medicaid. Rep. Pete Roskam (R-IL) not only made this point yesterday, but also highlighted a great quote from Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D-MT) on why Medicaid is “one of least effective programs in terms of health care in the history of the country.” From the Blair House health summit transcript:
“And I think one of the problems, to get to this coverage issue, is that the premise of this bill is that coverage is expanded through Medicaid, welfare. Speaker Pelosi a couple of minutes ago — or a couple of hours ago, actually said that health care reform is entitlement reform.”
SPEAKER PELOSI: “Yes.”
REPRESENTATIVE ROSKAM: “Yes. I would put a brighter light on that and say it’s entitlement expansion. Think about what we’re doing. The CBO when they wrote to Harry Reid — wrote to Senator Reid a couple of months ago, they said, look, there’s about 15 million people that are going to be put on Medicaid. And Medicaid is a house of cards. Medicaid is not something that is serving the public very well.” (more…)
Tags: Blair House, Health Care Summit, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Medicaid, ObamaCare, Rep. Pete Roskam, start over, welfare reform
In the News
March 1, 2010A Post-Health Summit Warning: Is Incremental Control Next for Obamacare?
In the wake of the White House’s health care summit, reconciliation is still seen as the likely route that congressional leaders and their liberal allies will take to jam Obamacare through Congress. Congressional Democrats and President Barack Obama already are using the summit as a public relations vehicle to help fast-track the Senate health care bill through a parliamentary process used primarily for budgetary issues.
But beware Plan B — the more “modest” plan. There’s a surer, well-worn path that the Clinton Administration took after the collapse of Hillarycare in 1994: A careful, well-coordinated, step-by-step march to the Left on federal health care policy.
The Republican congressional victory in 1994, even though it reflected public revulsion at the Clinton Administration’s proposed takeover of the private health care system, did not change the fundamental direction of federal health policy. It only changed the degree and velocity of liberal policy success. The Clinton team started taking baby steps to expand federal control over health care financing and delivery, lulling often clueless congressional Republicans into cooperation with long-term consequences for doctors and patients. In some cases, the GOP majority enacted provisions of the Clinton health bill word for word. (more…)
Tags: ClintonCare, Health Care Summit, HIPPA, Medicaid, Medicare, ObamaCare, reconciliation, schip, start over
In the News
February 26, 2010The President Health Proposal: Taxing Investment Income
In preparation for today’s bipartisan Health Care Summit, President Obama released his own version of health care reform earlier this week. The President’s proposal includes several high-ticket provisions for expanding coverage. Since he has promised time and again not to raise taxes on the middle-class in order to pay for health care reform, the President’s bill imposes a Medicare tax on the investment income of high-individuals to off-set some of the cost of expanding Medicaid and financing other provisions of his health agenda.
But, as Heritage analysts Karen Campbell and Guinevere Nell explain in a recent paper, these new taxes would have widespread adverse effects for all Americans, not just the wealthy that they target. This is partially due to the very nature of a tax: (more…)
Tags: Cadillac tax, Health Care Summit, Medicaid, Medicare tax, ObamaCare, President's proposal
In the News
February 23, 2010Morning Bell: Can They Make Obamacare Worse? Yes They Can!
Flacking for President Barack Obama’s “new” health care plan, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters assembled for yesterday’s press briefing: “The president posted ideas of his on the White House website today. We hope Republicans will post their ideas either on their website, or we’d be happy to post them on ours, so that the American people could come to one location and find out the parameters of what will largely be discussed on Thursday.” And this might have been a small bit of successful Obama administration gamesmanship on health care and transparency in government except for one small problem: reality. Not only do House Republicans already have their own health care plan, not only is it already available online, but the White House’s own website already links to it!
And speaking of the President’s behind-closed-doors plan, don’t believe any of those headlines showing a $950 billion price tag. That is an Obama administration-created number that should not be afforded any more credibility than Gibbs’ grasp of the contents of his own website. In fact, the independent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) published this about the President’s new plan yesterday:
“Preparing a cost estimate requires very detailed specifications of numerous provisions, and the materials that were released this morning do not provide sufficient detail on all of the provisions. Therefore, CBO cannot provide a cost estimate for the proposal without additional detail, and, even if such detail were provided, analyzing the proposal would be a time-consuming process that could not be completed this week.”
In other words, even with over a year to prepare for the moment they would finally release their own plan, the White House could only manage to obtain an “incomplete” grade from the official budget scorekeeper in Washington. So every time you hear the President say “my plan is paid for” or “my plan reduces the deficit,” just remember you are going to have to take his word for it.
And where the President’s plan is more firm than fuzzy, it only makes the scheme worse: (more…)
Tags: CBO, Cornhusker Kickback, Medicaid, Medicare, ObamaCare, President's proposal, price controls
In the News
February 22, 2010Obamacare Bends the Cost Curve Up: Here Is How to Bend It Down
President Obama often says that bending the curve in health spending downward is one of the main objectives of his health care reform agenda. There is indeed a consensus that health costs are growing at a rapid rate, and that reformers should work to slow the rising tide of spending.
But as Heritage’s Robert A. Book, Ph.D, and Jason D. Fodeman, M.D. point out, the big picture is not so simple. In order to successfully reduce health care spending, legislators must address what is causing expenses to rise in the first place. The big House and Senate bills are based on faulty assumptions.
Tags: consumer centered health care, Medicaid, Medicare, ObamaCare, third-party payer
In the News
February 3, 2010Another Taxpayer-Funded Medicaid Bailout
As President Obama’s recently-released budget for 2011 reveals, with or without a health care reform bill, Medicaid stands to receive a big, taxpayer-funded bailout. Again. The 2011 Budget includes $25 billion in additional funding for state Medicaid programs as an extension of the bailout that was included in the 2009 economic stimulus bill.
As Heritage analysts Dennis Smith and Nina Owcharenko argued then, depending on federal bailouts to carry Medicaid through economic hardships is bad policy.
The stimulus bill provided increased federal matching rates for Medicaid programs in all fifty states. This splurge in spending was accompanied by no caveats or strings attached to require true Medicaid reform, which is sorely needed. Instead, the federal government succeeded only in propping up the failed policies behind the broken government program, encouraging continued sluggishness in actual improvements to the system. (more…)
Tags: 2011 budget, Medicaid, state fiscal irresponsibility, stimulus bill, taxpayer bailout
In the News
January 13, 2010Morning Bell: Speaker Pelosi’s Job-Killing Agenda
After a three-week holiday break, the House of Representatives returned to session yesterday, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) marked the occasion with an op-ed detailing her “record of achievement” and outlining her agenda for the rest of the 111th Congress. Pelosi writes: “At the halfway mark in this Congress, our priorities are clear: strengthening the security of the American people and building a new economy that offers our families lasting prosperity.” But the 111th Congress is not the first Congress Speaker Pelosi has presided over. When Pelosi was first handed the gavel in January 2007, the U.S. economy employed 137.3 million people and our nation’s unemployment rate stood at 4.6%. According to the Labor Department’s most recent report, the U.S. economy has shed 6.3 million jobs since then, and 10% of our workforce is now unemployed.
Speaker Pelosi goes on to claim that President Barack Obama’s failed stimulus has “created or saved” 1.6 million jobs so far, but even the White House has abandoned its controversial “saved or created” jobs accounting scheme after more than 90,000 of the 640,000 jobs it claimed to create were found to be completely fraudulent. Pelosi then touts the Cash for Clunkers program as another success despite the fact the program did nothing to create auto sector jobs, led to a crash in auto sales, and did nothing to help the environment. Pelosi also celebrated the expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which only further bankrupts our states and inched us ever closer to government-run health care. (more…)
Tags: CHIP, government-run health care, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Medicaid, ObamaCare, small businesses
Latest Research
January 12, 2010Making a Bad Bill Worse
The Washington Post’s EJ Dionne’s had an op-ed yesterday detailing six policy areas where House Democrats believes they can pull the Senate health care bill further to the left. For every issue that Dionne identifies, a House victory would lead America even further down the path to government run medicine:
1. A National Health Insurance Exchange
A national exchange would create a vehicle for federal regulation of insurance policies and one-size-fits-all health plans that don’t necessarily meet the needs of all Americans. This threatens the federalist division of power between the national government and the states, and undermines the capacity of the states to function in this vital area of public policy. A national exchange would also pre-empt the states in pursuing their own efforts to expand coverage, or, for those states that would like to experiment with an exchange, it would encroach on the states’ abilities to tailor their state-based exchanges to their specific needs. A health insurance exchange, unfortunately, can mean many different things, from a facilitator of consumer choice and open competition to a restriction on both. For those interested in the concept, states based insurance exchanges have to be done right. Simply having the states administer a federal exchange makes matters worse, by hampering or even killing off state innovation.
2. Higher Subsidies for Exchange Enrollees
Offering higher subsidies to the few who are able to join the exchange will heighten the effect of the inequity among workers created by the Senate bill. This change would also add billions to the cost of the bill at the same time that other changes would lower revenue. This increases the likelihood that billions of dollars spent on health care reform will be added to the federal deficit.
3. Further Expansion of Medicaid
Both bills already significantly expand Medicaid eligibility. If the negotiations result in the raising Medicaid eligibility to 150 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL), as the House bill does, the Office of the Actuary estimates that TK million uninsured Americans would gain coverage through Medicaid. Anytime there is a public program expansion, one is going to see a “crowd-out” of private health coverage. Americans should not be fooled—the real story is these bills would expand coverage by putting millions of Americans into Medicaid, one of the country’s most poorly functioning health care programs. In that sense, contrary to false rhetoric by Congressional champions, both bills are a deliberate prescription for lower quality of care for millions of Americans.
4. A Weaker Excise Tax on High-Cost “Cadillac” Insurance Plans
To pay for the proposal, both bills depend on raising taxes to help pay for its trillion dollar “reforms.” The President has indicated he supports the Senate version, which would impose a new excise tax on so-called “Cadillac” plans. There is great opposition to the tax among unions, whose members, overwhelmingly middle class, tend to enroll in such plans. But, getting rid of the excise tax all together is not an option since it would have to be replaced with another revenue raiser; higher taxes somewhere else. Negotiations could end up creating more special interest exemptions – this time for unions – and leaving the non-union workers with “Cadillac Plans” to foot more of the bill. Look for new inequities being piled upon the variety of inequities already created by the House and Senate legislation.
5. The Ugly Nelson Deal: More Cost-Shifting All Around
Politicians, eager for “free” federal taxpayers money, are now looking to secure the same sweetheart deal for their states that Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) got for Nebraska. Called the “Cornhusker Kickback”, in the Senate bill, Nebraska’s Medicaid expansion would be paid for with federal taxpayer dollars. Under the Nelson-Reid agreement, the federal government would fully fund the expansion of Medicaid in Nebraska. Extending this deal to all 50 states would superficially appeal only to those state taxpayers who don’t share the sense of national embarrassment that stirs the massive opposition of the straight shooting, good hearted, solid folks in Nebraska. But of course, such a “deal” would only sharply increase the federal cost of the bill, shifting these costs back to state taxpayers as federal taxpayers instead. In an absurd process, taxpayers would see the costs shifted right back to themselves by the politicians promising something for nothing. Furthermore, if and when, if ever, the federal Medicaid matching rate expires, state taxpayers would be forced to make up the difference in funding on their own, forcing them to either cut funding to other programs or raise taxes, yet again.
6. More Micromanagement of Health Insurance
Both bills already transfer massive regulatory authority over health insurance plans to the federal government. Negotiations will likely add additional control to regulate and oversee the management of insurance companies. This could include increasing the medical loss ratio, removing antitrust exemption for insurance companies, more stringent age rating for premiums, and a heightened ability of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to review premium increases. All of these regulatory schemes would stifle consumer choice in the insurance market, undercut real market competition, and result in a government-run health care system, with or without the public option.
More and more, it seems that members of Congress are less interested in enacting meaningful change to the health care system that Americans actually want; and they are more concerned with getting the right number of votes for something, anything, that they can somehow call “reform”, even though the vast majority of Americans vehemently disapprove of what they are doing.
Tags: Ben Nelson, Cadillac Plans, Cornhusker Kickback, E.J. Dionne, government-run health care, Medicaid, national exchange, Obama Health Care Plan, public option
In the News
January 7, 2010Schwarzenegger on Obamacare: “They Got the Corn, We Got the Husk”
One of Obamacare’s biggest dirty little secrets is that in both the House and Senate versions of the bill, over half of those who gain health insurance do so through Medicaid. Both bills force more people who are currently eligible for Medicaid to enroll–and the states would be left to pick up the tab without any additional federal funding. For states already on the brink of insolvency, Obamacare will be a financial disaster unless they can all secure deals like the one Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) secured for Nebraska.
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger railed against the Cornhusker Kickback in his State of the State Address last night. Watch:
Tags: Cornhusker Kickback, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Medicaid, Medicare for All, ObamaCare, Sen. Ben Nelson
In the News
January 7, 2010Congress on Health Care: Sticking It To The States
In their quest for universal health care coverage, liberal lawmakers have come to a harsh awakening. As it turns out, insuring everyone is expensive! So, in an attempt to make good on their vast promises without going beyond President Obama’s $900 billion spending limit for health care reform, the Democrats have turned to Medicaid as a means to expand coverage in both the House and Senate health care bills.
Momentarily putting aside the question of whether expanding the nation’s worst program counts as reform, expanding Medicaid poses yet problems, using Medicaid to cover the uninsured is appealing to federal lawmakers because they can share the burden of paying for it with the states. Most state officials, unlike Congress, actually have to balance a budget.
In a recent paper, Heritage scholar Dennis Smith outlines why the states are simply incapable of carrying this burden, regardless of how high the federal matching rates are. Smith points out that, though state general fund expenditures over the last 32 years have increased at an average rate of 5.6 percent each year, in 2009 expenditures actually decreased. This trend is expected to continue into 2010. (more…)
Tags: fiscal crisis, Medicaid, ObamaCare, universal health care
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