I'd like to bring two pieces on S-H's proposal to expand Medicaid to your attention.
Philip Klein at the Washington Examiner:
Appearing on "The Dr. Oz Show," Trump said that if Obamacare were repealed, there would be a "fairly large" percentage of people who would still fall through the cracks and couldn't afford private health insurance. For those people, he said, "We have to go and we have to help them through the Medicaid system." That's the same Medicaid system that was created as part of President Johnson's "Great Society," that was expanded by Obamacare, that has been crippling state and federal budgets, and that has been failing patients with limited choices of doctors and poor medical outcomes. Of all government healthcare programs (save the Veterans Health Administration), Medicaid comes the closest to a single-payer, or socialized, system. Again, Trump tried to touch up his statement with free-market rhetoric about instilling more competition by getting rid of state-based insurance monopolies. "Every state has a line wrapped around it," he said. It's true that before Obamacare came about, a number of free-market proposals called for removing the restrictions on insurance carriers selling policies across state lines.
The purpose of this was to get around the onerous local benefit mandates (such as requiring that every plan in a state covered acupuncture) that could make insurance cost double in one state what it cost in neighboring states.
But the actual plan Trump released includes an important caveat — that insurers could offer plans in any state, "as long as the plan purchased complies with state requirements."
In other words, all plans would still have to meet local mandates, thus defeating the whole purpose of a proposal to get rid of state barriers — and giving no reason to believe he'd actually be ushering in more competition or driving down prices.Klein then puts this move in the context of the broader picture: S-H's enthusiasm for the minimum wage, his hands-off position regarding any serious reform of Social Security and Medicare, and his Most-Equal-Comrade-esque preoccupation with the infrastructure.
Ben Shapiro at the Daily Wire points out that Medicaid is already huge and economically teetering:
Shapiro further points out that S-H is overtly moving left because he knows his "conservative" shills will make excuses for him.I’m old enough to remember when Republicans opposed expanding Medicaid. As of 2013, Medicaid already covered nearly 60 million Americans and cost the feds $265 billion and the states another $192 billion. As Chris Jacobs of Conservative Review has written, “Both Medicaid’s size—currently 2.7 percent of gross domestic product, and growing—and its structure present fiscal difficulties.” Some studies show that Medicaid patients have worse outcomes than people without insurance altogether, Jacobs writes.
Bots, behold what you have wrought.
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