{"id":272596,"date":"2010-02-03T16:21:44","date_gmt":"2010-02-03T21:21:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.szone.us\/f95\/another-taxpayer-funded-medicaid-bailout-39004\/"},"modified":"2010-02-03T16:21:44","modified_gmt":"2010-02-03T21:21:44","slug":"another-taxpayer-funded-medicaid-bailout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/272596","title":{"rendered":"Another Taxpayer-Funded Medicaid Bailout"},"content":{"rendered":"
On 02.03.10 08:56 AM posted by Kathryn Nix<\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/p>As President Obama\u0092s recently-released budget for 2011 reveals, with or without a health care reform bill, Medicaid stands to receive a big, taxpayer-funded bailout.* Again.* The 2011 Budget includes $25 billion in additional funding for state Medicaid programs as an extension of the bailout that was included in the 2009 economic stimulus bill.<\/p>\n

<ahref="http:\/\/www.heritage.org\/Research\/HealthCare\/wm2235.cfm">As Heritage analysts Dennis Smith and Nina Owcharenko argued then, depending on federal bailouts to carry Medicaid through economic hardships is bad policy.<\/p>\n

The stimulus bill provided increased federal matching rates for Medicaid programs in all fifty states.* This splurge in spending was accompanied by no caveats or strings attached to require true Medicaid reform, which is sorely needed.* Instead, the federal government succeeded only in propping up the failed policies behind the broken government program, encouraging continued sluggishness in actual improvements to the system.<spanid="more-25493"><\/span><\/p>\n

What is more, federal bailouts of state Medicaid programs set states up for short-term dependency on federal dollars which will lead to long-term budgetary problems when these funds expire.* Nothing could make this clearer than the Medicaid bailout extension included in President Obama\u0092s 2011 budget.<\/p>\n

<ahref="http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424052748703762504575037220630245164.html?m od=WSJ-hpp-LEFTTopStories">In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Janet Adamy explains that additional Medicaid funding was included to respond to Congress\u0092 stalled efforts to achieve comprehensive health care reform.* Both of the health care bills would have expanded Medicaid and increased federal matching rates.* <ahref="http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424052748703762504575037220630245164.html?m od=WSJ-hpp-LEFTTopStories">According to Adamy, \u0093Some states were so confident Congress would pass a health bill that they included the extra Medicaid funds in their state budgets.\u0094* Thus the need for additional bailout money: state fiscal irresponsibility, encouraged by Washington.<\/p>\n

If Congress had structured the previous bailouts correctly in the first place, this additional bailout may not have been necessary.* <ahref="http:\/\/www.heritage.org\/Research\/HealthCare\/wm2235.cfm">Smith and Owcharenko outline how this should have been done.* Of course, the economic stimulus should not have included increased government spending in the first place.* Rather, tax cuts should have been used to invigorate the economy.<\/p>\n

That aside, a Medicaid bailout should have established criteria to ensure that states accepting more funding took the necessary steps to improve their programs.* States should have also been required to submit plans for long-term reform.* Medicaid beneficiaries currently suffer from lack of access to care due to outdated reimbursement systems.* Addressing this would improve the quality of care for enrollees.* Lastly, both state and federal governments should have made a commitment to achieving serious entitlement reform as a part of the bailouts, assuring they would not be needed in the future.<\/p>\n

But none of this happened.* Instead, once the extra federal funding expires, states will be left to deal with balancing their budgets and footing the bill for the same low-performing Medicaid programs.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/blog.heritage.org\/2010\/02\/03\/…icaid-bailout\/<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On 02.03.10 08:56 AM posted by Kathryn Nix <\/p>As President Obama\u0092s recently-released budget for 2011 reveals, with or without a health care reform bill, Medicaid stands to receive a big, taxpayer-funded bailout.* Again.* The 2011 Budget includes $25 billion in additional funding for state Medicaid programs as an extension of the bailout that was included […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-272596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272596\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}