Even as California struggles with a catastrophic fiscal crisis and other states scramble to avoid the same fate, Democrats in Washington are proposing health care measures that would add hundreds of billions of dollars of spending to state budgets, and impose a raft of new regulatory obligations on them all.
Most directly, Democratic plans to extend health care coverage to all Americans are contingent on a massive expansion of Medicaid. The program, which covers about 40 million people now, would gain 15 million to 20 million new beneficiaries if Democrats get their way.
The Congressional Budget Office pegged the cost of such an expansion at $500 billion over 10 years, but the total cost is higher because the estimate only counts the projected burden on the federal government. Under the current arrangement, Washington picks up about 57 percent of the cost of Medicaid - but states pay for 43 percent... [snip]
“There’s an air of unreality here,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, a member of the HELP committee. “The language is, ‘we’ll shift it back to the states’ as if the states had the money or a printing press. But this isn’t just a little increase. This is a bankrupting increase for most states.” [snip]
In 2006, then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney signed health care legislation in which the state government forced individuals to obtain coverage and offered them subsidies to purchase government-designed plans on a government-run exchange. The result has been skyrocketing costs and longer waits in doctors’ offices. A Rasmussen poll taken last month found that just 26 percent of voters in the overwhelmingly liberal state said the effort was a success.
Instead of learning from these failed experiments, Democrats in Washington are planning to use federal power to muscle all states into replicating them.
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