Subject: txt 1st hcare =
One reason Max Baucus's (D-Mont.) health care bill allegedly "pays for itself" over 10 years is because it would break all 50 state budgets by permanently expanding Medicaid, the joint state-federal program for the poor, says the Wall Street Journal.
Consider:
- Starting in 2014, Baucus plans to spend $287 billion through 2019 -- or about one-third of ObamaCare's total spending -- to add some 11 million new people to the Medicaid rolls.
- About 59 million people are on Medicaid today -- which means that a decade from now about a quarter of the total population would be on a program originally sold as help for low-income women, children and the disabled.
- State budgets would explode -- by $37 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) -- because they would no longer be allowed to set eligibility in line with their own decisions about taxes and spending.
This is the mother -- and father and crazy uncle -- of unfunded mandates, because this burden would arrive on the heels of an unprecedented state fiscal crisis.
While falling revenues are in part to blame, Medicaid is a main culprit, even before caseloads began to surge as joblessness rose, says the Journal:
Forcing states to spend more will crowd out other priorities or result in a wave of tax increases, or both, even as Congress also makes major tax hikes inevitable at the national level.
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