Medicaid enrollment has grown enormously in the past few years. It was originally thrown in as a last minute addition to Medicare, designed to cover a few very poor people. The coverage is far better than that received by most people covered by employee health benefit plans and basically free of any cost. Slackers galore populate the program now and it is subject to outrageous amounts of fraud. In fact, the very notion of providing people who can work or have other sources of health care coverage Medicaid is outrageous. Hard working people who have worse benefits at a high cost are paying taxes for this. But like a lot of things in this country now, the people who have Medicaid will vote to keep it. It is typical Dem party bribery.
One of the lies told to keep the massive Medicaid expansion, including to those perfectly capable of working, is that without Medicaid people won’t get health care and will end up in emergency rooms and hospitals. Arkansas passed a Medicaid work requirement some time ago, despite litigation. A new study finds that making Medicaid recipients work or lose their coverage had no effect on ER visits or avoidable hospitalizations when compared to recipients who because of age were not subject to the work requirement. In other words, they all somehow did just fine in finding any health care they actually needed. (Paragon Paper)
If we want to control health spending and have a healthier economy and have some basic sense of fairness to those people who work and pay taxes in this country, Medicare disability has to be reformed–it is full of slackers, and Medicaid disability reforms and work requirements have to be implemented.
