NC Legislators should reject Medicaid expansion
Published December 20, 2018
by Donald Bryson, President and CEO, Civitas Institute, December 18, 2018.
North Carolina has been a leader in enacting free-market reforms that are improving people’s lives. Four tax reform packages have reduced the burden of government and simplified filing for millions of Tar Heel families. The expansion of school choice has created a new opportunity for thousands of students. And the rejection of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion has helped protect North Carolina from a critical aspect of the federal government’s health care takeover.
Unfortunately, the newly bolstered Democrat legislative minorities, Gov. Roy Cooper and special interest groups are now pressuring leaders in the General Assembly to such an extent that House Speaker Tim Moore (R-Cleveland) indicated he is open to Medicaid expansion in North Carolina.
Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Washington cannot force the states to expand Medicaid. Former Gov. Pat McCrory and the General Assembly have already exercised our state’s rights, rejecting Medicaid expansion and the additional Obamacare empty promises that would come with it, when they passed Session Law 2013-5 in 2013.
Legislative leaders should now ignore renewed calls for Medicaid expansion — even when it comes from members of the Republican House Caucus, such as Rep. Donny Lambeth’s (R-Forsyth) Carolina Cares legislation.
The Obama administration assured states that Washington would pick up 100 percent of the expansion costs for the first three years, and then 90 percent thereafter. But how reliable is a guarantee from a federal government more than $21 trillion in debt, much of which is due to entitlement programs like Medicaid?
The problems with Medicaid expansion can also become systemic, particularly the unforeseen costs. The non-partisan Foundation for Government Accountability published research earlier this year which found that states that expanded Obamacare through Medicaid expansion have signed up more than twice as many able-bodied adults as promised. This enrollment deluge, combined with higher than forecasted per-person costs, has led to cost overruns of 157 percent.
The renewed call for Medicaid expansion in North Carolina also comes at a time when the state’s Medicaid program is switching to a managed care model and just recovered from multiple years of cost overruns which skyrocketed into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Medicaid expansion would inevitably hurt the most vulnerable North Carolinians. Medicaid is a program meant for impoverished citizens. However, because of Medicaid’s low doctor reimbursement rates, patients already have a tough time getting a doctor’s appointment, which contributes to the program’s shockingly poor health outcomes.
Indeed, according to state Medicaid Annual reports, from 2003 to 2016, the number of physicians enrolled as Medicaid providers in North Carolina plummeted by more than 10,000, a drop of 28 percent.
An expansion would add hundreds of thousands of non-disabled, childless, working-age adults to Medicaid, which would further exacerbate the problem of access to quality care for the neediest North Carolinians.
A job, not Medicaid, is the best anti-poverty program. North Carolina should keep moving forward with the proven job-creating policies of controlled government spending, tax cuts, and regulatory reform.
Caring for impoverished citizens and families isn’t the same thing as locking more people into Medicaid. Medicaid is a safety net program. However, expanding Medicaid would dramatically change the purpose of the program and necessitate increased government spending and higher tax rates, which will likely make it more difficult for those that need a job to get one. Thus, Medicaid, instead of helping our indigent citizens, locks them into a vicious cycle of poverty and the safety net becomes a net trap.
Expanding Medicaid is a bad deal for everyone, except special interest profiteers. The General Assembly should not cave to political winds by trying to control healthcare through a law that was sold on deceit and has delivered countless broken promises. North Carolina should reject Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion once and for all.
This article was previously published in the Raleigh News & Observer and the Greenville Daily Reflector.
https://www.nccivitas.org/2018/nc-legislators-reject-medicaid-expansion/
December 21, 2018 at 10:04 am
Mandy Rogers says:
I totally agree, no need to expand Medicaid to able bodied adults. Only elderly or disabled adults & indigent children & indigent pregnant women should be on Medicaid. The parents of indigent children should be removed from Medicaid, never understood why they got Medicaid anyway. With our unemployment rate as low as it is, these able bodied adults need to find a job.
December 30, 2018 at 11:43 am
Norm Kelly says:
Democrats control our House and Governors mansion. Socialized medicine is almost a done deal.
Why? Because socialized medicine is good for people and the economy? No.
Democrats want to expand socialism and specifically socialized medicine in our state simply because it's another feel-good program that they expect to bring them more votes. Democrats rarely, if ever, care about the outcome or impact of their feel-good programs. It's not the outcome that counts for Democrats. It's the impact that their supposed caring has on the uninformed, the easily swayed, and those educated in our public schools system (who've been systematically taught that free enterprise is bad, socialism is good).
Democrats want to call their scheme 'medicaid expansion' or some other fruity nice sounding terminology for the simple reason that it sounds better, more plausible, more likely to improve outcomes, and less destructive than calling it by it's actual name: Socialized Medicine.
It's not that the majority of democrat supporters are educated enough about socialized medicine to know that it has failure built in. It's that democrats know it's easy for even the undereducated to search the internet for facts about socialized medicine around the globe to become educated, and therefore opposed to socialized medicine. But, then again, it's possible that too many undereducated democrat voters will simply drink this kool-aid also and believe that since OUR socialists are in charge of the scheme, it can succeed. It's possible that some of these supporters will believe the lie that it's bad management in the rest of the world that causes socialized medicine schemes to fail, and that our crop of socialists actually KNOW how to properly manage an idea that they have no skill or education in - knowing what these socialists are doing is not required for OUR socialists to be successful.
For all you public-school educated socialists out there, please just google the idea of socialized medicine around the world and read the horror stories. They are out there. Find out what the financial costs are. Find out what the waiting times are like. Research how well our veterans are taken care of by our existing socialist medicine program. Remember when democrats TOLD us to use the veterans program as an example of how successfully THEY could implement socialized medicine for all? Why did they stop telling us to use that example? Research it. Find out that vets are extremely under-supported. Vets are forced to pass by hospitals in order to WAIT for care at VA centers. It's real. Do the research and educate yourself while you still have time!
