Even as the Obamacare rollout grows more muddled, some issues are becoming clearer — including why NC should be glad it isn’t more entangled in this mess.
First, defenders of the Affordable Care Act have been saying that the state-run exchanges are running better, so North Carolina should have run its own exchange.
Um, it depends on what you mean by “better.” According to a new report:
A CBS News analysis shows that in many of the 15 state-based health insurance exchanges more people are enrolling in Medicaid rather than buying private health insurance. And if that trend continues, there’s concern there won’t be enough healthy people buying health insurance for the system to work.
More here.
In other words, instead of being signed up for private insurance, more people are being added to Medicaid, which threatens to bankrupt states. In North Carolina, Medicaid has had cost overruns running into hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Yet patient health outcomes have grown worse. In a state-run exchange, that problem would only grow worse.
Which brings us to North Carolina’s refusal to expand Medicaid under the ACA. Another key article points out additional problems with expanding Medicaid.
First, as we have pointed out in the past, and the above report confirms, Medicaid does little or nothing to improve health outcomes for poor people as a group. Why add thousands and thousands of people on to it?
Second, how long will that federal money for Medicaid keep flowing? Washington faces a debt of $17 trillion. Congress could decide tomorrow to slash how much it pays for Medicaid, leaving the states holding the bag.
Expanding Medicaid would burden North Carolina taxpayers with hundreds of millions of dollars in costs, while doing little for people who do need help.
Getting involved in Obamacare will bog down North Carolina in these problems. It’s better to hope that, once Obamacare completely collapses, North Carolina can extricate itself from this mess and make real reforms.
Good article. Can you please report how much of NC Medicaid funding is attributed to illegal aliens? Can you determine how much of this funding is sent to addresses outside the state and nation? Are there any states that have unusually low amounts of Medicaid funding per 1000 population? Can we learn from them? Can Civitas propose a path that ends all federally-supported Medicaid, making our state immune from Federal meddling on this issue?