Obama's Medicaid Expansion Promise is a Bait and Switch

Obama’s henchmen are coming out with all sorts of studies trying to entice States into buying their snake oil of expanded Medicaid funds if they adopt the health care exchanges.  As of now, the central government is promising they’ll cover between 90 and 100% of the cost of new enrollees.  But this is just a bait and switch scheme for a one payer system, which will ultimately fall upon the States to fund and administer, while the federal government issues mandates from on high.

Legislators and policy makers shouldn’t get “snookered” by the study authors’ promises of large federal matching shares, Brase said, because taxpayers eventually are on the hook for all the costs.

“They are trying to make you forget that federal dollars are paid for by taxpayers, and because it’s all new spending they even agree that state Medicaid spending will increase,” Brase said.

If North Carolina were to refuse the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, the Medicaid rolls still would grow by 174,000 people by 2022 due to normal population growth and eligibility, the study shows. If the Obamacare expansion were approved, that number would grow by still another 568,000 enrollees.

Such growth concerns Brase. She said there are likely to be hidden technology, personnel, and administrative costs with any expansion.

“If you have to start hiring more people in order to deal with this mass increase in the subsidized [population], then we’re talking about state tax dollars,” Brase said. “It will be hard to cut the rolls” once the newly added Medicaid patients become dependent on the system.

“Already 31 percent of physicians refuse new Medicaid recipients,” according to a recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Brase said. With fewer doctors accepting patients, and more doctors leaving the field because of low reimbursement rates, there will be a push at the state level to find new options to treat these patients — and they will not be free.

Unfortunately, the 2012 general election has shown the majority of Americans do believe health care is free.  They have a rude awakening coming.

Source:  http://www.carolinajournal.com/exclusives/display_exclusive.html?id=9734