Medicaid Expansion Will Produce Same Results: Higher Costs, Less Quality Care for Current Medicaid Recipients

Mar 30, 2021 by AFP

COLUMBIA, SC – Americans for Prosperity-South Carolina (AFP-SC) today urged lawmakers to reject calls for expanding Medicaid. AFP has long been opposed to the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare that will add hundreds of thousands of able-bodied, working age adults to an already broken system.

AFP-SC State Director Andrew Yates issued the following statement:

“Medicaid expansion will result in higher taxes, cuts to essential services, and less quality health care for current Medicaid recipients. Instead of further government involvement in our health care, we need to pursue a personal option that gives South Carolinians more choices and better health care. Despite calls from some lawmakers that South Carolina will now be given free money from the federal government, Medicaid expansion will force South Carolina taxpayers to hold the bag once the inevitable cost increases occur. We should continue rejecting an inefficient program that under-delivers on quality and costs and pursue reforms that give patients more affordable choices.”

In 2020, AFP developed a 5-point policy plan, “A Personal Option,” focused on providing more options removing the barriers that make health care unaffordable for so many. Read the full proposal here and coverage of the effort in National Review and CNBC.

Background:

Medicaid was intended to focus resources on the most vulnerable Americans like the elderly and the disabled, but its expansion to able-bodied, childless, working-age adults would create an unsustainable burden on taxpayers and crowd out resources for those truly needy populations.

Medicaid is simply not cost effective. Researchers from MIT, Harvard, and Dartmouth found that Medicaid recipients only value about 20 to 40 cents of benefit for every dollar spent on Medicaid. Insurance companies, not low-income citizens, are the biggest winners of Medicaid expansion. Kaiser Health News reported that Medicaid insurer profits more than tripled in 34 states and the District of Columbia after Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.

In every state that has expanded Medicaid made possible by Obamacare, enrollment has far outpaced projections and per patient costs have been nearly twice the original estimate.