Medicaid Spending Skyrockets: So Much for “Affordable Care”

Medicaid spending will double in the first ten years of full implementation of Obamacare, according to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates.

The cost of the Obamacare subsidy that the U.S. Treasury will pay on behalf of people who earn under 400 percent of the federal poverty level and who buy a government-approved health-care plan on a government-run health-insurance exchange will increase by approximately 8-fold in its first ten years of operation, according to the latest budget estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.

The (Orwellian named) Affordable Care Act expands the Medicaid rolls by providing subsidies to states that make people earning up to 133 percent of poverty eligible for the program. People signing up for insurance on the exchange whose income is below that level must be enrolled in Medicaid. [Sources: cnsnews.com 9/15/14, and Congressional Budget Office.]

Raising the cost of health care 8-fold is exactly what Obamacare had to do. It made more people eligible for Medicaid. It was the backdoor approach to socialized medicine. And it’s actually working, according to that intention.

Granted, lies were told to get the law passed. One lie was that you could keep your existing insurance, and therefore your doctors. Tell that to millions who lost their insurance, and had to switch to Medicaid or some other Obamacare approved plan.

Another lie, we now see, is that Obamacare would “cut the cost of health care.”

First of all, it’s not the government’s job to “cut the cost of health care.” Transactions between doctors/hospitals and patients are none of the government’s business. Yes, the government is heavily involved because of programs like Medicare and Medicaid. But it’s not possible to cut the cost of those programs. Because when government provides something for “free,” as a moral right or entitlement, this increases demand for health care services across the board. Have you noticed how doctors do so many unnecessary tests? It’s not only because of the liability climate; they also realize, with Medicare and Medicaid, there’s nothing to lose. Someone else is paying for it anyway.

The “someone else is paying for it” has to come home to roost somewhere. These CBO figures are the beginning — and only the beginning.

The federal government refuses to deregulate medical care and health insurance. It makes personal responsibility for one’s health care and insurance almost impossible, even if people wish to exercise that responsibility on a free market. As more and more people are herded into Medicare and Medicaid, the cost of these programs will only swell higher and higher. At present, our President and Congress (both parties now) act as if the national debt and deficit are no longer a problem. We just keep raising the debt limit and deficit — into infinity, I suppose — and nothing bad will ever happen.

It’s the same principle as the housing market bubble. The federal government, in that case, decided that people were not buying enough houses, and not spending enough on houses. As a result, it created incentives in the federally-run mortgage and lending program to make it easy to buy houses. We see what happened. Some blame that bubble on “lack of regulation” of the lending industry. However, if the government hadn’t been involved in the lending industry in the first place (with guaranteed federal money to back up poor judgment by private lenders), the market would have regulated itself; without the promise of government bailouts, it would have to do so.

With health care, the federal government has done kind of the same thing. Although the supposed purpose of Obamacare was to lower the cost of health care, its actual goal was to make it easier for everyone to get government insurance — i.e., Medicaid.

The politicians know full well what they’re doing. They realize — and knew all along — that herding people into Medicaid would cause costs to skyrocket. But once the vast majority of the public are on government programs — well then, the federal government can cut and manipulate health care practices as it sees fit. After all — where is everybody going to go, once government is the equivalent of the public school system? And where are doctors going to go, when government is for all practical purposes the only payer of health care expenses?

Back when “snail” mail mattered a lot more, the U.S. post office was not all that popular as a means of delivering communication. People generally found it to be a perpetually bankrupt, inflationary, arrogant and unaccountable bureaucratic monolith. This is one reason why private, for-profit alternatives like FedEx and UPS came into popularity. With the inept Obama administration (and its forthcoming equivalents) in charge of all things medical, who or what will become our health care equivalent of FedEx and UPS?

The “Affordable Care Act” was never about affordability. It was always about control.

Amazing. When a private company satisfies willing customers and grows huge because of it, government declares it a “restraint of trade” and prosecutes or otherwise harasses the people who created the success.

When government herds people into a gigantic medical/Medicare/Medicaid monopoly, eroding if not ruining the practice of medicine and bankrupting the nation in the process, it’s called “hope and change.”

Obama and his successors will not pay the price for this. They should, but they won’t. Because people are, by and large, too willfully ignorant or afraid to stand up and face the truth: Government health care has got to go.

But it will go, anyway; and it will not go quietly. Like other victims of socialist programs throughout history, Americans will just have to learn the hard way.

 

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