How should Medicaid funding crisis be addressed?
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Gov. Terry Branstad expressed concern Monday that government health care programs such as Medicaid are taking a larger bite out of the state budget.
Branstad said the federal formula for calculating Medicaid cost shares is penalizing states like Iowa that have growing economies by shifting a greater share of program costs from the federal government to state budgets.
“If your economy is in the tank and your state is badly managed, you get more money,” he said. “That’s not the way we want to run things in Iowa.”
Branstad noted that Medicaid used to make up about 12 percent of the state budget when he was governor in the 1990s, but now it is approaching 18 percent and could go higher under federal plans to expand the program’s coverage in fiscal 2014.
“We’re concerned that Medicaid has been the biggest growing cost to state governments,” said Branstad, who has joined with other governors in seeking flexibility in instituting federal health reforms in order to avoid extra state spending. He said his administration is “very careful and cautious about buying into federal mandates” that may not be affordable, as the president and Congress work through so-called federal cliff financial challenges to cut national deficit and debt.
“This is a Cadillac program. The problem is it is a rusted-out Cadillac,” Branstad said of the current federal Medicaid cost-share approach with states. “We’d like to be able to have a new program that we could together consistent with our philosophy of being the healthiest state where we partner with people and people contributed some to their own health, and then the state also assists them as opposed to a federal program — which is an entitlement where it’s the government’s responsibility and I have no obligation or responsibility for my own health. That’s something we’re trying to change.”
Do you agree with Branstad’s approach to the Medicaid funding issue? Do you think expanding Medicaid eligibility will present a major budget problem for Iowa?
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With respect to Medicaid, Medicare and health care in general, the focus needs to be on lowering the overall cost of providing care.
All other industrialized countries have demonstrated an ability to keep their overall health care costs substantially lower than what we pay and, based on statistics, they have better results. We have to focus on why they can keep costs down, without compromising the quality of care, and we cannot.
” We have to focus on why they can keep costs down, without compromising the quality of care”
You are truly living in a dream world. Here’s what happens to people in Britain.
http://tinyurl.com/an5kh2w
It’s frustrating to read comments when folks cite a link but make no attempt to describe what they think the message of the cited article is. In this case we are suppose to take the problems of one patient in Great Britain as an indictment of the British medical model. The thirty to forty million Americans who have no insurance and often cannot afford the most basic care certainly outweigh a single case in Britain. And in addition to the thirty or forty million mentioned, there are countless cases where insurance companies have denied treatment based on pre-existing conditions or other fine print exclusions.
One way to lower the cost of both Medicare and Medicaid would be to expand coverage to include younger, less poverty stricken, and healthier people. Medicare already charges premiums based on income and a 20% co-pay on most care. The same could be done with Medicaid.
A larger pool of people who are healthier and who contribute on a sliding scale to the cost of their own care can only be beneficial to all of us.
I think people like Branstad forget that people get sick, get hurt and end up in emergency rooms (very expensive) whether they have insurance or not.
Hospitals don’t like that because they have to cover the costs of those people. Perhaps the real solution is to find a solution to governors like Branstad. I think we should just let the Hospital Industrial Complex eat him.
Problem solved
“expand coverage to include younger, less poverty stricken, and healthier people.”
In other words Gov’t ran healthcare. ugh Talk about a record stuck on one tune.
Mr Abernathy,
Do you have a suggestion or are you posting just to complain.
Both Medicare and Medicaid provide very good insurance at a lower cost than what most Americans are stuck with. And these programs certainly provide better care than that given to people without any insurance at all