How More HSAs Could Help Dig Us Out Of The Hole Of Disastrous Medicaid Expansion

President Biden’s long overdue decision to end the Covid-19 public health emergency declaration on May 11 has exposed the big-government activists who used the pandemic to expand and entrench the nanny state.

The federal government passed a law that prohibited states from removing Medicaid-eligible people from their state until the emergency declaration was overturned. In exchange, the federal government picked up a bigger share of the program’s cost at taxpayers’ expense. By a whopping 12%, Medicaid enrollment has increased 25 percentIt was renamed from a temporary fix to something more permanent.

Due to the December budget deal states will be able to check eligibility for Medicaid again in April. The public health emergency must have been over long ago. It was President Joe Biden who said in September that, “The pandemic is over.” Washington, however, decided to allow the emergency to continue even though Americans knew that the crisis was over. 

It is simple. Rahm Emanuel said that government dependency purveyors will not allow a crisis to go unattended if it can be used to advance their goals. The continuous extensions to the emergency order were not made to improve public safety or address a real emergency. They were used to preserve a Medicaid expansion, which the president knew Congress would never make permanent. Medicaid is an end in and of itself for these people. 

This prolonged emergency measure had devastating consequences. Medicaid expansion diverted billions of dollars from delivering essential medical care to vulnerable children, the elderly, and the disabled — the people Medicaid was designed to serve. The lure of taxpayer funds also attracted scammers who were eager to make quick money from federal emergency responses. While we saw many examples of fraudsters stealing money from the government to pay for their lavish lifestyles, the problem is even more devastating for taxpayers when it occurs in entitlements like Medicaid. 

The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating waste, fraud and abuse in Covid programs. It has “seen reports that $266 billion in improper payments were made by Medicaid during the pandemic.” That is an outrage, but here’s what happens in the normal course of events with permanent entitlements. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services discovered that federal health programs were not being used in 2022. $132 billion in illegal paymentsMedicaid was accounted for 60 percent The total includes $81 billion of misallocated expenses. It is clear that the Medicaid program requires responsible oversight and management.

Naturally, big-government activists measure a program’s success by its enrollment numbers. However, policymakers need to look beyond the number of enrollees to evaluate whether the program is able to provide quality care and positive outcomes for patients. Because many providers don’t want to pay the government reimbursement rate, Medicaid recipients with medical needs are more restricted than those with employer-sponsored insurance. 

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