Cannon (paraphrasing): Conservatives don’t understand that they have the better side of the argument:
-Tax burden of Medicaid: $1100 per capita.
-Covers 4 people for the price of 10 (6 people lose their health insurance).
-Increases price of private care (prescriptions by 13 percent!)
-Traps families in low-wage jobs.
-Covers more than just the poor. Creates artificial poverty among those who could afford it.
-Lowers the quality care of care.
-Makes states grovel to DC for (matching funds).
Costs of Medicaid are growing. The trendline shows that the system is gobbling up more and more people. Why does Medicaid grow? In your state, you can get Big Government at 1/3 the price! Consider the following:
-NC pays 1/3, DC pays 2/3.
-Incentive to expand, never an incentive to cut.
It’s the best hope for socialize medicine (since more and more are people entering every day).
How does Medicaid trap NC families in low wage jobs? There is no financial incentive to get higher wage job after a certain point (due to total gov’t benefits). That is, the more you earn, the fewer overall benefits you recieve — which creates incentives to subsist (much like Welfare did prior to 1996). When the worker improves her condition with a better job, the effective tax rate on her earnings becomes 100 percent. In other words, she starts losing out by doing better. Medicaid thus keeps people in poverty, keeping them in the low-wage trap. Expanding medicaid would result in more of the same trap, only deeper. Incentives matter.
Expand Medicaid, then? Bad Idea. Instead: Make it only for the truly needy and cut it back. It’s analogous to Welfare Reform, which was a HUGE success. The same could be true for Medicaid.
If you want to make it more affordable, reduce mandates! (I, for example, don’t need to buy coverage for alcoholism, in vitro fertilization etc. etc. But I’m forced to pay for it in NC.) That makes our state among the most regulated states in the US. But we can change that.