Medicaid Expansion a Bad Idea

Of all the bad ideas related to Obamacare, depending upon Medicaid to do the heavy lifting to "insure" Americans is about the worst of the bunch.

Medicaid was not built to handle the economic stresses of dealing with the number of people it already has in the program. If you don't believe me, ask President Obama himself, who in 2009 called Medicaid a "broken system that doesn't work." This broken system is already putting extreme pressure on state budgets, and that will only increase over time.

From 1990 to 2010, national Medicaid expenditures increased from $73.7 billion to more than $401 billion, a 445 percent increase. Over the same period of time, the Medicaid caseload increased just 135 percent, from 22.8 million people to 53.6 million.

Now the solution is adding millions more people nationwide?

Proponents insist Texas should accept the money because they're "free" federal dollars. Well, for one thing, there are no "federal" dollars. There's only money that's brought in from taxpayers and money that's borrowed from our children and grandchildren.

Secondly, we recently saw thousands of criminal aliens released within our borders in a federally-sponsored jailbreak because the federal government said they just couldn't afford to deport them. If Washington can blithely break such an integral promise as national security, we're skeptical that they'll keep funding an expanded Medicaid system, which will cost tens of billions in federal and state revenue in the years to come.

Lastly, our system just isn't built to support that many people. Only 3 in 10 Texas doctors are currently accepting new Medicaid patients, which means a lot of these new patients would struggle finding someone to cover them, anyway.

Medicaid needs to be reformed and improved, not expanded. States need the flexibility to address the specific needs of our unique population. We want to be able to implement solutions like asset testing, to ensure care is there for those who truly need it the most. Health savings accounts and cost-sharing initiatives - such as copays, deductibles and premium payments on a sliding scale - will give patients more control over their spending. And we need to promote private access, to encourage those already qualified to take advantage of existing, private coverage.

Washington needs to allow flexibility, not mandates, to solve this problem. And expanding Medicaid is no solution at all.