Is Now the Time to Increase Medicaid Spending?
Thursday, December 11th, 2008 By Marc KilmerAs the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports, the federal government approved (in a roundabout way) Ohio’s expansion of the state government’s health insurance plan for children. Governor Strickland pushed to expand the program to families up to 300% of the federal povery level and the General Assembly gave unanimous approval last year. With the state facing a huge deficit, however, there are questions about whether this is a good use of taxpayer money.
Last year I wrote an article explaining why this type of health care expansion is a bad idea:
it is likely that a large number (perhaps a majority) will either leave or refuse to sign up for private health insurance to use the government program. A few studies have been done recently about how government health care programs “crowd out” private insurance. That is, having a free or essentially free government program leads people to choose it over private coverage. One estimate put this number as high as 60 percent — or, six out of ten children signed up either had or would have had private coverage. Others put the number between 25 percent and 50 percent. …
Unfortunately, for those children who lose private insurance and switch to government health care, they will find that the quality of their care will decrease. Patients with Medicaid often have trouble finding doctors and report they would rather be on private insurance. It makes no sense for the government to set up incentives to move to lower-quality care.
While it may sound like a good idea, the reality is that the kids being covered by this expansion don’t really need it. The vast majority already have coverage and it’s very likely that most of those covered by this program expansion would be used by families that would otherwise have insurance coverage. It’s a bad idea even if the state had a surplus. In a fiscal climate like Ohio is facing today, however, it’s ridiculous that anyone would even entertain it.
Tags: budget, Health care, Medicaid
December 11th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
We need way more than medicaid! How are we the most advanced country and the worst health care. Forget the financial industry, what we need is a freaking health care bail out. We need H.R. 676! Support H.R. 676 http://www.thomas.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:h.r.00676:
AND CALL YOUR CONGRESS WO/MAN!
December 11th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
We certainly don’t have the have the worst health care results in the world. However, if you really think our system is so poor, I fail to see how moving toward more government control is the answer. The government already funds more than half of our nation’s health care. The less-than-half of the health care that is privately funded is incredibly heavily regulated. I’ll grant you that our system has a lot of problems. Since the government is by far the largest player in health care, it makes sense that it bears a lot of the blame for these problems, doesn’t it?