Tag Archives: Medicaid

News

Americans choosing not to purchase Obamacare exchange plans

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On Fox News Sunday, Brit Hume talked about how the majority of the new enrollees are signing up for Medicaid, not Obamacare, and how young people are refusing to sign up for Obamacare plans on the exchanges.

And more discussion from the same panel:

For those who can’t watch, here’s an article from Fox News about how the majority of new enrollees are choosing Medicaid, not Obamacare plans.

Excerpt:

While virtually all the ObamaCare focus is trained on the program’s dysfunctional website, another problem could be emerging — in states where individuals are able to sign up, far more are enrolling in Medicaid than private plans.

For now, the statistics are spotty. The Obama administration still hasn’t provided figures on how many people have successfully enrolled through the federally run exchanges. Some, but not all, states have provided their own relatively up-to-date figures.

But for those that have, the lopsided numbers show Medicaid is getting the lion’s share of enrollees.

In Washington state, more than 35,000 people have signed up for coverage since Oct. 1. Of them, just 4,500 went into private plans. Roughly 31,000 signed up for Medicaid — with coverage kicking in sometime between now and Jan. 1.

The director of the state’s Health Care Authority said they were “pleased by the strong response of Medicaid-eligible residents.”

But the imbalance — if it does not even out in the months to come — could create problems for private insurance companies which are relying on a major influx of new and healthy customers to make the system hum.

“There are a lot of elements of this law that have to work, that must work — otherwise the whole thing collapses,” the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon said. “They need — need — lots of healthy people to sign up for insurance through the exchanges.”

The fact that people are flocking to Medicaid isn’t necessarily a problem — but a lack of healthy enrollees on private plans would be.

The main reason the Affordable Care Act mandated that individuals buy insurance was so that private insurers would get enough young, healthy people in the system who could offset the costs of covering older and sicker patients. Otherwise, at the very least, costs will skyrocket for those in the system.

[…]The Democrat and Chronicle newspaper reports that in New York, nearly 24,000 of the 37,000 newly enrolled residents are going into Medicaid, which millions of New Yorkers are already on. Just 13,313 chose private plans.

Medicaid is fully taxpayer-funded, so this is not going to help the deficit/debt situation at all. That money will have to be borrowed and paid back by taxpayers. Making things worse is the fact that young people are not signing up to purchase the overpriced health insurance plans on Obamacare exchanges.

Excerpt:

As Nick Gillespie and Veronique de Rugy have pointed out for Reason magazine, the concept of today’s older generation as impoverished is simply wrong. In fact, today’s seniors are far wealthier than today’s young adults.

Looking at rates of homeownership, 83% of elderly households own a home. Meanwhile, 36% of millennials are still living under their parents’ roof. Those over 65 years of age have much lower poverty rates than most other demographic groups. Households headed by people 65 or older have 22 times the wealth of households headed by people under 35.

Not only are many young people either unemployed or underemployed, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimates that people under 40 owe 67% of the roughly $1.4 trillion that Americans owe on school loans. That’s on top of an average of several thousand dollars of credit card debt.

ObamaCare forces people who can scarcely afford the extra cost to subsidize care for people who absolutely can afford to pay for their own health services.

In the exchanges, a young person will have to pay an estimated $250 per month for basic insurance. Again, this cost is so high because these premiums are expected to pay for older people’s healthcare costs. These costs now include covering a plethora of expensive drugs, services and procedures thanks to ObamaCare’s requirements for insurance plans.

Buying plans on insurance exchanges costs money, and many young people don’t have any money to spend these days. Young people have not done particularly well at finding jobs lately, especially since they have acquired precious few marketable skills in the public schools. (Most people can’t get a job calling people racist and sexist and homophobic, because there are only so many journalism jobs to go around).

So what Obama has really done is promised lots of goodies to all of his supporters, but there is no one signing on to pay for it. And that’s what I would expect from someone with no marketable degrees or skills who has very very limited experience working in the private sector. Many of the people in the Obama administration just haven’t done anything productive in the private sector, and that lack of experience is now showing. We have elected a government that believes in making policy based on feelings, not facts.

News

New study from the Federal Reserve finds that QE stimulus doesn’t grow the economy

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Investors Business Daily reports on our incompetent government’s policies.

Excerpt:

For four years now, we’ve heard policymakers and pundits alike defend the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing based on the idea that, without it, the nation’s economy would have imploded.

Now, a new study from the Fed itself suggests that’s not the case.

The study, by San Francisco Federal Reserve economist Vasco Curdia and New York Fed economist Andrea Ferrero, suggests that quantitative easing (QE) has done little to boost the economy’s trajectory.

“Asset purchase programs like QE2 appear to have, at best, moderate effects on economic growth and inflation,” the economists wrote in a special research note that was released last week.

In their study, Curdia and Ferrero looked specifically at the impact of the Fed’s QE2 program, which totaled $600 billion.

Assuming the $600 billion program lasts for five years — with the Fed buying bonds the first year, holding them for two, then selling them off for the remaining two — the spending turns out largely to have been a waste.

That level of QE stimulus, even when coupled with the Fed’s promise to hold interest rates at zero, likely boosted GDP by a mere 0.13 percentage point, the study found. It added just 0.03 percentage point to inflation.

Bottom line: $600 billion in QE2 spending boosted GDP by less than $200 billion.

[…]And even that minor amount of growth was due in large part to the Fed’s explicit vow to hold official interest rates at close to 0% until the unemployment rate reaches 6.5% or lower, Curdia and Ferrero said.

Take away that promise, and QE2 added just 0.04 percentage point to GDP and 0.02 percentage point to inflation.

What caused it?

With $17 trillion in total U.S. debt — an amount that’s now growing at a rate of $1 trillion a year — the authors argue that the Fed is essentially trapped into printing money through QE.

If QE — which now pushes $85 billion a month into U.S. Treasury and agency debt — stops, interest rates will soar, dragging the economy down.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has been sanguine about this, suggesting this enormous pile of debt can all be sold off with little disruption.

We’re not so sure. Once the Fed begins selling off its massive $3.6 trillion in assets acquired under the QE program (see chart), it will send interest rates surging and tank the economy.

Even more troubling is what it says about current politics.

The White House and a Democrat-led Senate have boosted spending dramatically — outlays as a share of GDP rose initially by 25% under President Obama

The Fed, by buying up much of the newly issued federal debt, has become the No. 1 enabler of a spendthrift government that’s pushing us to the brink of fiscal disaster.

At $85 billion a month, QE2 spending is roughly equal to the amount of federal debt we add each month.

We elected a Keynesian who thought that government could create economic growth (jobs!) by borrowing money and printing money. The countries of the world largely cheered our decision to elect him. He failed to grow the economy and he failed to create jobs. Eventually, the money he’s been spending to keep a sinking ship afloat is going to run out.

News

Planned Parenthood must pay $1.4 million in Medicaid fraud settlement

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The Heritage Foundation reports.

Excerpt:

Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, which serves southeast Texas and Louisiana, agreed this week to pay $1.4 million to the state of Texas, settling claims that one of the largest abortion providers in the Southeast had fraudulently overbilled the state’s Medicaid program.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office stated that its investigation into the fraud allegations “revealed that Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast improperly billed the Texas Medicaid program for products and services that were never actually rendered, not medically necessary, and were not covered by the Medicaid program.”

The Texas Planned Parenthood allegedly “falsified material information in patients’ medical records” to bolster fraudulent claims for reimbursement.

Alliance Defending Freedom’s recent analysis of state and federal audits of family planning programs suggests that in 12 states, Planned Parenthood affiliates overbilled Medicaid for more than $8 million. One federal audit of New York’s Medicaid family planning program reported that certain providers, “especially Planned Parenthoods,” had engaged in improper practices resulting in overpayment.

Despite mounting accusations of fraud, the organization that performs roughly one out of every four abortions in the U.S. has continued to ride the waves of taxpayer funding to annual surpluses. During its last reporting year alone, Planned Parenthood received over half a billion dollars in taxpayer government funding, all the while performing a record 333,964 abortions. To solidify its place as the top abortion provider in the country, Planned Parenthood announced that all local affiliates would have to begin providing abortion services starting in 2013.

A one million dollar fine doesn’t seem like much, compared to over $500 million in taxpayer subsidies. But it’s a start. Abortion is a for-profit business. If we make abortion unprofitable, then abortion will go away.

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