The Senate proposal wouldn’t cut Medicaid spending in real dollars — spending would continue to grow — but it would slow the rate of spending for the program, phase out extra money the federal government has given to states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) and leave states to pick up more of the tab.
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If we want to make headway on improving public policy discourse, a good place to start might be with how we’re debating Medicaid policy, in particular how it might be affected by pending legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA), including legislation presented on Thursday by Senate Republicans.
Medicaid has long been on an unsustainable cost growth trajectory. This was true long before the ACA was passed in 2010, though the ACA exacerbated the problem. Annual federal Medicaid spending is currently projected to grow from $389 billion in 2017 to $650 billion in 2027. The biggest problem with that growth rate is that it’s faster than what’s projected for our economy as a whole. As with Social Security and Medicare, Medicaid costs are growing faster than our ability to finance them.
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The House-passed bill left large numbers of Americans uninsured, in part because very low-income households could not afford to enroll in private coverage even with the House’s tax credits. Medicaid is the nation’s safety net insurance program. In practical terms, there is no real alternative to Medicaid for a person below the poverty line. Under the approach recommended here, federal Medicaid funding would be dispensed to the states to strengthen the safety net for the poor, even as there would be less support for expanding the program to persons with higher incomes.
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Much of the public discussion about health care and health insurance reform abounds with misinformation. Medicaid, in particular, has become a political tool, with daily posts and articles about reforms to the program that distort the record for political gain. But there is little mention of the need to empower governors to take ownership of the program.
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Obamacare’s second biggest flaw is that even as it upended the half-century long consensus over who should be in Medicaid, the law inexplicably left intact a feature of Medicaid that we have known for decades fuels excess spending: its open-ended matching rate.
So long as states put up a dollar to fund Medicaid, Uncle Sam is obliged to match it with anywhere from $1 to $3 federal dollars depending on that state’s unique matching rate. It has been proven empirically that this formula fuels higher spending. An analysis by Thad Kousser at UC Berkeley showed that all other things being equal, shifting a state from the lowest to highest federal matching rate increases discretionary Medicaid expenditures by 22 percent.
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It’s been just over seven years since President Obama declared: “It is not sufficient for us simply to add more people to Medicare or Medicaid to increase the rolls, to increase coverage in the absence of cost controls and reform. Another way of putting it is we can’t simply put more people into a broken system that doesn’t work” [emphasis added].
Regrettably, the law he signed less than 10 months later fell far short of the president’s own benchmark as it relates to Medicaid. Not only did the ACA fail to impose any cost controls on Medicaid, it likewise contained no reforms to reverse or even corral the perverse incentives that for decades had simultaneously led to indefensible levels of Medicaid overspending even while creating enormous problems of access to the very people the program aimed to help. Instead, it amplified those incentives, making an already-bad situation even worse.
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Section 1332 of the ACA permits states to submit simultaneous and combined “superwaivers” for Medicaid and for provisions of the ACA itself. These superwaivers could make it easier for states proposing plausible ways to allow states that serve Medicaid beneficiaries more efficiently to reprogram federal and state savings into health programs for non-Medicaid eligible households. For households with working, nondisabled adults, it should also be made easier for states to pool their federal and state funds for Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the ACA, and other programs to deliver coverage through private plans in the ACA exchanges. It is also time to allow states more flexibility in using Medicaid and other health care funds to invest in the social determinants of health—items such as adequate housing, school-based social services, improved lifestyles, and safer household environments, which can contribute to improved health and reduced medical costs.
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Reforming Medicaid does not have to be an all-or-nothing approach, where millions of people are thrown off of the program to reduce the budget. The states, which administer Medicaid, are closest to the problem and also are in the best position to develop solutions for Medicaid. With leeway to innovate and the pressure to achieve savings, the circumstances are ideal for change.
Since the program’s inception, the federal government has had regulations in place that mandate certain services be provided and that also set rules around eligibility. Those states seeking to innovate have had to secure a waiver from those rules.
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From the earliest days of Obamacare, a great many Democrats and others on the left have wanted a “public option.” At least one plan offered in the Obamacare exchanges should be a government plan, they proclaimed. The state of Nevada may make that wish a reality, if the governor signs a bill just passed by the legislature – allowing everyone who resides there to buy into the state’s Medicaid program.
Why does the left like this idea? Because they are ideologically committed to the propositions that when it comes to health care (1) non-profit is always better than for-profit and (2) public is always better than private.
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We can estimate the impact of the AHCA per-capita cap on the pre-Obamacare Medicaid population by using data from CMS, which expects that the federal government will spend approximately $6.7 trillion on the legacy Medicaid program from 2017 to 2026. If we apply CBO’s estimate of future medical inflation to the AHCA, we get to a spending reduction of $107 billion from 2017 to 2026. $107 billion represents 13% of the CBO’s estimate of the AHCA’s Medicaid spending cuts. More importantly, it represents a paltry 1.6% of total federal spending on the legacy Medicaid program over that time frame.
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