Washington continues to debate health policy as if the number of people covered by government insurance programs is the key measurement of success. This week brought more evidence that the ObamaCare experiment of signing up millions more people for subsidized coverage has not made Americans healthier.
“Life expectancy in the United States fell for the second year in a row in 2016,” NBC News reports this week. The network quotes the government’s National Center for Health Statistics:
“This was the first time life expectancy in the U.S. has declined two years in a row since declines in 1962 and 1963,” the NCHS, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a statement.
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California’s “Medi-Cal” program is one of the worst offenders when it comes to controlling costs. It’s getting worse not better. In fact, Medi-Cal is such a big spender it begs the question what is driving out of control spending in the Golden State – waste, fraud, abuse, incompetence, or all of the above? Every taxpayer in America should be asking these questions, as we are all footing the majority of the bill.
Over the past ten years, Medicaid spending in California has almost tripled, growing from $37 billion per year to a whopping $103 billion per year—including both state and federal funding. And things have only accelerated since the state expanded Medicaid to a new group of able-bodied adults.
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