The Medicaid time bomb

NY Post ^ | 12/07/13 | Michael D. Tanner

[Libloather]

The good news, if you want to call it that, is that roughly 1.6 million Americans have enrolled in ObamaCare so far.

The not-so-good news is that 1.46 million of them actually signed up for Medicaid. If that trend continues, it could bankrupt both federal and state governments.

Medicaid is already America’s third-largest government program, trailing only Social Security and Medicare, as a proportion of the federal budget. Almost 8 cents out of every dollar that the federal government spends goes to Medicaid. That’s more than $265 billion per year.

[Libloather]

And it’s going to get worse. Congress has shown no ability to reform Social Security or Medicare. With ObamaCare adding to Medicare spending, we are picking up speed on the road to insolvency.

Maybe Detroit could bail out DC.

[txrefugee]

When at least 50% of Mexico’s poor will be getting Medicaid from the U.S. taxpayers, this program is doomed. Mexifornia will be the first state to go under.

[VRW Conspirator]

Indeed, already Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid account for 48% of federal spending. Within the next few years, those three programs will eat up more than half of federal expenditures...State governments pay another $160 billion for Medicaid today. For most states, Medicaid is the single-largest cost of government, crowding out education, transportation and everything else.

No big deal, it's other people's money.

[Sooth2222]

It shouldn't be a gov't spending problem if few physicians will treat Medicaid patients because the level of reimbursement is so low.

(It could be a problem for those of us who will turn blue in the ER waiting to be seen because the staff is occupied treating Medicaid patients with the sniffles.)

[expat2]

Obamacare is going to cut Medicare spending -- that's what the Death Panels are for.

[Pearls Before Swine]

I don’t understand this. What’s the difference between someone who is signed up for Medicare, and someone who shows up poor at the hospital, unsigned, and gets free care that is paid for by Medicaid?

Since so few doctors will accept Medicaid for regular health maintenance and the appointment waits are so long, the degree of health maintenance and prevention it will provide is minimal. What is the change, and what is the difference in cost?

[NTHockey]

Tick, tock.

Wait until the states (like the royal duchy of Delaware) find out what it is going to cost them.

Tick, tock.

[RFEngineer]

“Obamacare is going to cut Medicare spending — that’s what the Death Panels are for. “

People who expect government to take care of them, even in old age, are voluntarily presenting themselves to the Death Panels.

[Graybeard58]

There’s an obvious solution.

Tax the rich.

[ronnie raygun]

When you are dead you no longer cost them money, you stop recieving social security, disability, and for the low information voters they recieve more unemployment, welfare food, stamps and the ability to vote numerous times for the candy man, its a win win

[Gaffer]

The ones that show up with no Medicaid, no money and no notice ‘emergencies’ have to be treated to the extent that the ‘emergency’ is stabilized. Nothing more. Medicaids are more problematic because they can be longer term patients.

[what's up]

Bump

[Principled]

What are ramifications of such medicaid expansion wrt to states who expanded medicaid vs states that did not?

IMO those who “expanded” will not get fed funds as promised and will be on the hook much sooner than they thought.

...and states who did not “expand” will be much, much better off

but i dunno - I’m asking for FReeper thoughts...

[spokeshave]

From the UK....

LONDON, June 21, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - An eminent British doctor told a meeting of the Royal Society of Medicine in London that every year 130,000 elderly patients that die while under the care of the National Health Service (NHS) have been effectively euthanized by being put on the controversial Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), a protocol for care of the terminally ill that he described as a “death pathway.”

Scale that up to the size of the US population....and you get over 750,000 euthanizing events a year...

meanwhile......

And just wait till they start issuing orders to the doctors to match client with the care required....and prescriptions....don't forget all those complex prescription orders.

I see not just amputations on the wrong limb....but on the wrong patient.

and don't expect quick response for a broken arm:

And so you have an acute appendix....?

Mark Wattson, 35, from Swindon may have been the victim of botched surgery after he had to have his appendix removed twice

To his shock, surgeons from the same team told him that not only was his appendix still inside him, but it had ruptured - a potentially fatal complication.

In a second operation it was finally removed, leaving Mr Wattson fearing another organ might have been taken out during the first procedure.

The blunder has left Mr Wattson jobless, as bosses at the shop where he worked did not believe his story and sacked him.

Mr Wattson told of the moment he realised there had been a serious mistake.

'I was lying on a stretcher in terrible pain and a doctor came up to me and said that my appendix had burst,' he said.

'I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I told these people I had my appendix out just four weeks earlier but there it was on the scanner screen for all to see.

'I thought, "What the hell did they slice me open for in the first place?"

'I feel that if the surgery had been done correctly in the first place I wouldn't be in the mess I am today. I'm disgusted by the whole experience.'

Mr Wattson first went under the knife on July 7 after experiencing severe abdominal pain for several weeks. He was discharged but exactly a month later he had to dial 999 after collapsing in agony. Mr Wattson

Mr Wattson was readmitted to the Great Western Hospital in Swindon after his appendix ruptured.

Nurse will see you now

[Taliesan]

The noose will be closed when there is a law that doctors have to take Medicaid patients. This can either be a condition of licensure, or it could be a condition of Medicare participation. At that point, the gov’t will control the reimbursement levels and be the single payer, even though in name alone there may remain multiple programs. There has never been a need, tactically, for the left to pass a single payer law. They are already there.

[randita]

But none of these projections foresaw that so many of ObamaCare’s enrollees would be Medicaid eligible.

Maybe the projections didn't see this, but anyone with half a brain did.

Medicaid is single payer. The whole goal of Nobamacare was to add millions more to the Medicaid rolls. The law would have forced every state to set up an exchange to enroll people with incomes of up to 400% of the poverty level in Medicaid. The pot sweetener was that Obama, aka Santy Claus, would pony up 100% of the additional state costs for the first year, and 90% after that.

The SCOTUS threw a wrench into the plan by ruling that the state exchanges were optional, not mandatory. 34 odd states declined to set up their own exchanges, because they saw that loading millions more onto strained Medicaid rolls was a recipe for disaster.

So the single player plan is stalled for a time.

Here's what's down the road. Multi millions in states that have not set up up exchanges are caught in the middle. They can't afford the outrageous premiums (even with federal subsidies), yet they make too much money for Medicaid. Those multi millions will go without insurance.

So the ranks of the uninsured will swell dramatically - to way more than the 30 million that Nobamacare was supposed to remedy.

Those states without exchanges are going to be excoriated and labeled every liberal class warfare slur in the book. The purpose will be to browbeat them into setting up exchanges and enrolling people into Medicaid. Can they withstand the pressure?

If the Medicaid expansion is beaten back, a huge stake is driven into the heart of Nobamacare.

[Pearls Before Swine]

Don’t they sign up for Medicaid, after being stabilized, or sign whatever forms are put in front of them after they get sick in order to get continued care?

If all we did for illegal aliens was “stabilize” them, our costs wouldn’t be as high as they are now. This reminds me of something from several years ago. I was on a cruise ship, and at our table was a couple. The guy was a conservative, NRA member; the woman was a liberal who worked as a contract ICU nurse. At the time the ACA was still up in the air, and she was strongly for it.

She said that she had seen insurance companies go out of their way to deny care to potentially healthy (if they got the care) young people, and thought O-care would fix that. Then she came up with a real stunner. She said, “Do you know who gets the best care? Illegal aliens, because there’s no gatekeeper to control costs.”

[RFEngineer]

“When you are dead you no longer cost them money”

When you are dependent on the government, you are subject to their whims.

Do you want liberty or not? Did you think Medicare was “free money”?

[RFEngineer]

“Scale that up to the size of the US population....and you get over 750,000 euthanizing events a year...”

When you give up liberty, you give up life. What our founding fathers knew instinctively is just now beginning to dawn on people who have become dependent on “popular” government programs.

[1010RD]

Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz