COVID is over. Let Medicaid return to normal
Washington Examiner
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President Joe Biden is not one to let a good emergency go to waste. His Health and Human Services Department is pressing states to keep COVID-19 expansions of Medicaid long after even the Biden administration admitted the coronavirus pandemic was over.
HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra sent letters this week to the governors of nine states attacking them for not auto-renewing coverage for children as Medicaid enrollment has decreased by millions nationwide. HHS claims 60% of all Medicaid coverage loss is in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Dakota, and Texas.
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Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R-AR) shot back at Becerra, calling his letter a “politically motivated PR stunt” and accused Biden of “playing politics at Christmas.” Sanders is right, and she should keep her current policies, as should the other eight states.
At the start of the pandemic, Congress passed the 2020 Families First Coronavirus Response Act. It provided states with temporary emergency funding to expand Medicaid and prohibited them from removing people from the program, regardless of eligibility changes.
Medicaid is a means-tested program. Millions of people join or leave its rolls every year as their incomes fall or rise. Normally, as people’s income rises, they lose Medicaid eligibility. But under emergency COVID law, states were forbidden from recalculating who was eligible. This was always supposed to be a temporary measure that would pass when the COVID emergency ended. Biden is just using the inevitable decrease in Medicaid enrollment as a political weapon against Republicans.
Considering that decline in enrollment was inevitable as emergency funding and eligibility rules changed, the real drops in enrollment have been modest. Texas, for example, saw its Medicaid caseload increase by 50% during the COVID emergency, with children accounting for more than 70% of the increase. But since the emergency ended, Texas Medicaid enrollment has only fallen by 12%. What we are witnessing is a modest and slow return to pre-pandemic norms.
Democrats love to make Medicaid expansion seem a costless benefit for everyone, but this is magical thinking. Not only do federal taxpayers foot the bill for increased enrollment, but as emergency funding from Congress disappears, the cost is shifting to state taxpayers.
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Expanding Medicaid to those who could otherwise afford private health insurance makes it much harder for those who need Medicaid to get healthcare. Medicaid pays doctors less for each patient and procedure than it does for Medicare, and far less than private insurance. This means that most doctors limit the number of Medicaid patients they see. By increasing the number of Medicaid patients looking for doctors, Medicaid expansions make it harder for those already on Medicaid to get treatment.
The federal government is borrowing record sums of money. California faces a record $68 billion budget deficit. Neither the federal government nor blue states can afford to keep their spending promises. Biden should not be pressuring red states to make the same mistake.