This week, the House is preparing to vote on the Senate-passed health care bill, which depends on a massive expansion of Medicaid to reduce the number of uninsured.
However, as has become apparent in the months of debate surrounding Democrats’ health care proposals, all that glitters is not gold—especially in the case of expanding Medicaid, a low-quality, poorly-functioning federal-state program which fails to meet the needs of its beneficiaries. Increasing the number of citizens dependent on this program fails to address its numerous shortcomings, and instead applies them to millions more.
A recent article in the New York Times portrays the plights of current Medicaid beneficiaries which are slowly becoming the norm. Since Medicaid reimburses doctors significantly below the cost of providing care, more and more doctors are being forced to turn patients away. According to Dr. Saed J. Sahouri, “…we’re really losing money on seeing those patients, not even breaking even. We were starting to lose more and more money, month after month.”
As it becomes harder for Medicaid beneficiaries to find providers, more and more rely on emergency room care—in fact, Medicaid enrollees are more likely than even the uninsured to end up in emergency rooms in lieu of primary care.
As former Heritage analyst Dennis Smith points out, Medicaid spending is demanding a larger portion of state budgets, squeezing out other state priorities from education to transportation. This is a trend which is expected to continue in the years ahead.
If the federal government is serious about health care reform, expanding Medicaid is the worst way to go. Making more Americans dependent on this program may decrease the number of uninsured, but will do nothing to improve the access and quality issues plaguing the program. Moreover, federal funding to cover the expansion only offers states temporary relief and simply shifts these costs to federal taxpayers. Eventually states (and state taxpayers) will be left to pick up the cost, only intensifying the problems in the future.
Washington can do better by reforming Medicaid so that it works for those who currently use it. Heritage analyst Nina Owcharenko outlines what states legislators and Congress can do to improve the quality of Medicaid:
States … should mainstream some Medicaid enrollees into private coverage and adopt consumer-directed models to promote personal responsibility and enable individuals to take control of their health care decisions… federal policymakers should look for ways to make this process easier and remove obstacles to change.
…Congress should enact key health care initiatives, such as health care tax credits, and private long-term care incentives that complement Medicaid reform and relieve the increasing pressures on state Medicaid budgets.
Millions of Americans currently struggle to receive adequate care due to Medicaid’s inadequacies. Adding more families to these poor performing programs will make these problems worse.
Over the weekend, Senators from both sides of the aisle debated the merits of Obamacare with a level of emotion rarely seen in the halls of the U.S. Senate. But one senator took home the prize for the most outrageous comments unbecoming of an elected representative. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) began a floor speech citing a liberal op-ed that referred to the “lunatic fringe,” which appears to lump all sorts of groups in with conservatives. He used this as a catalyst to make floor remarks (seen in the video above) about Obamacare’s opponents saying: “They are desperate to break this president,” Whitehouse continued, “…it is unbearable to them that President Barack Obama should exist.”
Between those tragic thoughts he lumped in members of the Aryan nation, birthers, militias and fanatics with the entire overwhelming majority of Americans opposed to Obamacare. So even though members of his own party were on the fence about the Senate’s health care legislation right up until they got $300 million payoffs, the non-bought-off Americans opposed to it must just hate the President. What other rationale could they have…well…except for the unfunded entitlement expansions, tax hikes, lesser quality care and massive expansion of government control of their lives. But those are small issues compared to their hatred of a politician, right? Right? Wrong.
Let’s be perfectly clear, the only bipartisan agreement in the United States this weekend was against the Senate’s health care legislation. Polls showed opposition ranging from 61% over at CNN to 56% at Rasmussen. These are not fringe elements of society. They hate the policy, not the President. They hate the bill. This is the type of dangerous rhetoric that leaves us with a divided Congress and a divided America. And somebody in the media should ask Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) if he condones such remarks with the same tenacity they would have if the parties in Congress were reversed. Someone should ask each and every one of his colleagues if they agree that all those opposed to Obamacare are members of some radical fringe element.
The funny thing is that Senator Whitehouse’s outrageous comments overshadowed the part of this video where he talks about the “last thrashing throws” of the health insurance industry as it watches its business model die. Right after these comments, he voted to unconstitutionally mandate every American buy private insurance from this “dying” industry. But who could rationally be opposed to that?