Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
“Across the nation, sizeable and forceful groups–a Medicaid medical industrial complex–support welfare medicine, many of them becoming entirely or partially dependent on its funding for their financial viability. Their reliance on the low-income health program puts them at risk of adverse political decisions, but also drives them to exert disproportionate influence over policymakers. Vested interests–professionals,…
Tyler Cowen thinks that one way to reduce the fiscal burden on States is to move Medicaid to the Feds. Wisconsin may be taking a first step in that direction. Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle, having to make $400 million in Medicaid cuts, left these cuts up to Federal Medicaid officials. Newsweek reports that “The fixes,…
How will health reform affect state health care costs? Will reform bankrupt states as some Republicans say? Or will costs be negligible, as Democrats claims? According to a study by Holahan and Dorn (2010) the answer is somewhere in the middle. Most of the additional costs will come from expanding Medicaid to newly eligible population,…
In Virginia, there are over one million people age 60 and older and over 90,000 Virginians age 85 and older. These figures will only grow in the upcoming decades. Thus will put increasing strain on public programs and will require service providers to reorient medical care toward providing continued, high-quality long term care services. Long…
Although Medicaid is currently one of the largest programs in any state’s budget, Congress enacted this welfare health insurance scheme as almost an afterthought. Consider the news coverage for Medicaid at the time. According to the chart below, the New York Times didn’t even mention Medicaid an any article in 1965 and Medicaid was mentioned…
The Stimulus Package, also known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), key goal was to boost a flagging economy. A number of the provisions in the $787 billion package went towards health care provisions. The Kaiser Family Foundation notes that “the Act includes $149 billion in health spending of which $87 billion is…
Health Reform, also known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), drastically altered the health care landscape. Congress included health exchanges, and individual mandate, and a number of other reforms into the bill. Today, I focus on how Health Reform will affect existing programs which care for the nations poor. In particular, CHIP…