The Medicaid Scare Campaign

The GOP reforms are modest, but they’ll improve care for low-income patients and expand private insurance options

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"the bill stops some abuses by imposing work requirements on able-bodied adults, tightening eligibility checks, and freezing provider taxes that states use to extract more federal matching funds."

"Democrats are flogging a new study  . . . that purportedly finds the ObamaCare Medicaid expansion reduced mortality among the low-income adult population by 2.5%."

"But the study’s design has some flaws, and the 2.5% difference in mortality for low-income adults between the expansion and non-expansion states wasn’t statistically significant when disabled adults were included."

"ObamaCare expansion hasn’t reduced deaths among lower-income, able-bodied adults. U.S. life expectancy remains about the same as it was in 2014 owing largely to increased deaths among such adults from drug overdoses and chronic diseases."

"A study last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that working-age adults on Medicaid were about three times more likely to die from drug overdoses in 2020 than those not on Medicaid."

"Medicaid recipients have less access to doctors than Americans with private insurance because of low government reimbursement rates."

"About 74% of physicians accept new Medicaid patients versus 96% for privately insured patients."

"these managed-care organizations lack a market incentive to improve provider networks or deliver healthcare more efficiently." 

"Medicaid expansion has increased emergency-room utilization."

"Medicaid recipients in southeast Pennsylvania were 2.9 times more likely to use the ER than non-Medicaid beneficiaries"

"Medicaid patients experience worse outcomes, more complications and higher readmission rates"