Even With Reconciliation Savings, Medicaid Spending Will Continue to Grow
- BY FGA
The House just passed its budget resolution, which includes reconciliation instructions for the House Energy and Commerce Committee to save taxpayers $880 billion over the next decade.
Cue the handwringing and dramatic claims from the Left that House Republicans are preparing to completely gut Medicaid, risking the health and well-being of low-income Americans.
Let’s say for a moment that all of the $880 billion did, in fact, come exclusively from Medicaid savings. Medicaid spending wouldn’t even decrease—it would merely slow down. With $880 billion in “cuts” to Medicaid, annual Medicaid spending will still grow by 25 percent by 2034.
To call these deep and painful cuts is intentionally ignoring the numbers to play politics. And when you play politics with Medicaid, it’s the truly needy—the communities the program was designed to serve—who are most likely to lose.
It shouldn’t be a partisan issue to acknowledge that Medicaid needs to be reformed. Improper spending in Medicaid alone is on track to cost more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years. Every dollar spent improperly or otherwise wasted in the Medicaid program is a dollar that cannot be used on low-income children, individuals with disabilities, pregnant women, and the elderly, who are continuously put at the back of the line behind able-bodied adults—millions of whom aren’t working at all.
If the House Energy and Commerce Committee wanted to focus its attention on Medicaid to meet its requirements under reconciliation, there are plenty of reforms it could consider that would protect the truly needy, strengthen program integrity, and, of course, save hundreds of billions of dollars.
Here are a few ideas:
- Close loopholes that added illegal aliens to the Medicaid rolls.
- Require states to check Medicaid eligibility for able-bodied enrollees more frequently and with better technology.
- Require able-bodied adults without young kids to work, train, or volunteer.
- Equalize federal support for all enrollment groups, ending ObamaCare’s preferential treatment of able-bodied adults.
For more on how states and the federal government can promote work over welfare, click here.
