03/12/2013
Aaron CarrollDylan Matthews has an awesome chart on the Ryan budget proposal. There’s only one line I want to talk about:
Again with the Medicaid? This is a huge cut in 10 years. It’s enormous. Do people really think that Medicaid – which is already the cheapest insurance around, which already under-reimburses according to most opponents – has that much fat and waste to be trimmed? Really?
Not that long ago, when the House passed a similar budget that called for a 34% reduction in 10 years, these would have been the consequences:
How can states possibly account for that difference? Where’s the magic in innovation? If states refuse to cut benefits and spend the same per enrollee, then even if the Medicaid expansion of the ACA never takes place, an additional 19 million people need to be dropped from the 2021 Medicaid rolls to meet budget cuts. That’s about one-third of all people on Medicaid. If states cut benefits or somehow slow spending to that of GDP growth, they still need to remove 13.8 million people from Medicaid in 2021, in addition to forgetting the ACA Medicaid expansion. If states act to protect the elderly and blind or disabled persons by holding their spending/benefit reduction to 10% (which is still a large cut), then 27 million people, most of them children and pregnant women, need to be dropped from Medicaid in 2021 even if ACA’s Medicaid expansion never occurs.
That was before the expansion. This is likely after. The changes will have to be even larger.
There is no great and powerful wizard here. When will everyone just go look behind the curtain?
by foosion on March 12th, 2013 at 12:10
“Do people really think that Medicaid … has that much fat and waste to be trimmed”
No. The author of the plan wants to take funding from the poor in order to cut taxes on the best off (including reducing the headline rate from 39.6% to 25%). Other parts of the plan slash spending that benefits the middle class.
The massive amount of human suffering it will cause is not a major concern.
by Aidan on March 12th, 2013 at 12:14
Aaron, this isn’t about trimming fat and waste. This is about dismantling the welfare state and cutting social services to the poor while reducing taxes on the rich. How many budgets has Paul Ryan released so far? Causing people to be dropped from Medicaid coverage isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
by Tweeder on March 12th, 2013 at 15:38
How many have passed into law?
by Addi on March 15th, 2013 at 19:16
Let’s call a spade a spade. We’re talking about shifting from poverty welfare to corporate and affluent welfare.
by Aidan on March 12th, 2013 at 13:22
Neera Tanden has a great quote in this National Journal piece about Arkansas’ Medicaid privatization:
“They’re just paying a lot more money for an ideological opposition to public insurance.”
by Bob Hertz on March 12th, 2013 at 21:32
Medicaid pays for close to half of the childbirths in Arizona and California.
Those babies are predominantly non-white.
Medicaid is compassionate, and therefore Medicaid attracts poor people from harsher countries and harsher states.
One wonders if Ryan is secretly going after minorities, which tend to vote Democratic. His policies would likely lead to higher rates of infant mortality — secretly and on purpose.