On Wednesday, The Daily Caller posted an article about the impact of the Big Beautiful Bill on Medicaid.
The article reports:
Signed into law by President Donald Trump on July 4, the GOP’s sweeping tax and spending package projects over $1 trillion in savings from Medicaid reforms. While Democrats have portrayed the changes as an unprecedented assault on the health care system, they ignore the explosive surge in Medicaid spending over the past decade and mischaracterize reforms that mainly target a widely exploited funding loophole and nonworking, able-bodied enrollees.
“What we’re seeing from the left and special interest groups are blanket fear-based arguments against the proposal,” Nina Owcharenko Schaefer, director of the Center for Health and Welfare Policy at the Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “These are just common-sense changes that tighten up the existing structure of the Medicaid program, weed out fraud, waste and abuse, and help the system function better.”
The article explain one way the Medicaid system is exploited:
Just a day before the bill’s passage, a rural hospital in Nebraska announced that it would be shutting down, citing “anticipated federal budget cuts to Medicaid.” Democrat Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont warned it would be the “first of many hospitals to close” because of the “horrific cuts.”
Yet, many of the key reforms — including the crackdown on “provider taxes,” which critics describe as a gimmick used by states to inflate Medicaid costs and extract more federal dollars — will not take effect until 2028.
The federal government matches a portion of each state’s Medicaid expenditures. To maximize this match, many states tax hospitals and other healthcare providers, then return that money to them as Medicaid payments, creating the appearance of higher state Medicaid spending.
“Provider taxes are basically funding gimmicks and legalized money laundering that allow states to scheme federal taxpayers into footing the bill for bailouts to hospitals,” said Dublois.
The article concludes:
Democrats such as New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, have claimed that work requirements “will result in millions of Americans losing health care coverage and getting sicker due to bureaucratic paperwork requirements,” while some corporate media outlets have argued states would struggle to build systems to track compliance.
However, with implementation still years away, Dublois said states have a “lengthy runway to get this done,” adding that “[Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] provides guidance to those states well in advance of when those work requirements need to be implemented, and there will be CMS grant funds available to states to help implement them.”
State Medicaid agency data obtained by the FGA through Freedom of Information Act requests reveal that 62% of non-elderly, able-bodied individuals on Medicaid did not work. Additionally, the American Enterprise Institute found in May that Medicaid recipients who do not work spend 4.2 hours per day — or 125 hours a month — watching TV and playing video games, more than 50% above the 80-hour work requirement.
“It’s the common-sense parts of the bill that are hard for liberals to argue against, so they don’t want to look at what’s actually in the bill,” said Schaefer. “A lot of the fearmongering out there is saying, ‘We just want the status quo to run as is. Let’s keep our heads in the sand and let’s not worry that we’re spending a trillion dollars on a program that is supposed to be for very low-income people.’”
Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but I believe that people who are able to work and do not have small children should be required to work in order to receive government benefits. The rest of us are required to work to pay those benefits.
