Saturday, August 13, 2016

Democrats Pushing Medicaid Expansion Despite Higher Costs






How can anyone declare a federal government agency is unbiased in the Age of Obama?  Anyone with common sense knows these bureaucracies are peopled with progressives whose sole purpose in life is to expand the federal government and protect those who adhere to their totalitarian ideology.  Can anyone say Hillary Clinton?  If it weren’t for Obama’s Justice Department she would be sitting behind bars by now.  Unbiased my ass.

So, I'm rather amused by an Associated Press article on an unbiased report from “nonpartisan experts” at the Center of Medicare and Medicaid Services. 

The nonpartisan experts at the CMS Office of the Actuary wrote in their report that they were expecting costs to decrease in 2015. They had reasoned that uninsured people who were putting off care would sign up for Medicaid in 2014, the first year of expansion. The experts expected that pent-up demand would ease in 2015, and per-person costs would drop. But the opposite happened: Costs went up.

An Obama administration spokesman says estimating the cost of a new health program is not an exact science.

"It is natural for estimates to change as new data become available, but the bottom line is that a growing body of evidence shows that Medicaid expansion improves the health of states' citizens, while reducing the burden of uncompensated care," CMS spokesman Aaron Albright said in a statement.

Albright said that the overall cost of the Affordable Care Act's coverage expansion is still lower than estimated when the law passed in 2010. However, other variables besides per-person costs enter into that overall figure. They include the total number of people enrolled, which has been lower because many states have not expanded Medicaid.

Really?  Probably because these scoundrels tried to dump those cost off onto the States.  Sure, these D.C. creatures would help fray the cost for the first three years, but after that who knows.  Democrats are still trying to con States into enrolling in this monstrosity.

In a recent report to Congress, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the cost of expansion was $6,366 per person for 2015, about 49 percent higher than previously estimated.

"We were told all along that the expansion population would be less costly," said health economist Brian Blase with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia. "They are turning out to be far more expensive." Blase previously served as a GOP congressional aide.

The new estimates could be a warning light for Democrat Hillary Clinton, who has promised that if elected president she would work to expand Medicaid in the remaining 19 states that have not done so. Higher costs would make it harder for a President Clinton to sell Obama's full-financing plan to Congress.

If the costs are higher than expected, then why would anyone want to expand it?  Maybe there is something wrong with the law.  Has anyone thought about that?  Are these people really this stupid?


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