“The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” That’s the familiar refrain of Chicken Little in the fable about coming disaster. To hear the Biden administration, and its surrogates like the American Hospital Association, disaster is looming on the healthcare horizon.
What am I talking about? The Covid Public Health Emergency declaration is finally coming to an end in May and those who have benefited from it are up in arms. Make no mistake about it, this is a long overdue day of reckoning for Medicaid and those who have greatly benefited from the declared emergency situation.
Stephanie Armour, reporter for The Wall Street Journal, says, “An unprecedented effort by states to review the eligibility of more than 90 million people on Medicaid carried high financial stakes for industry groups, including hospitals that risk paying more to cover uninsured patients and insurers that could lose some of the money they get for managing state Medicaid programs.”
She notes that eligibility reviews for people who get Medicaid coverage were paused during the Covid-19 pandemic. The resumption of those reviews and disenrollment of people, technically starting Saturday, April 1, has industry working with federal regulators, patient advocacy groups and state Medicaid offices to urgently inform beneficiaries. All of them are working to tell enrollees what steps they can take to avoid losing coverage or how to secure other types of health insurance if they earn too much for the program.
To read her report, and the responses of the hospital industry, you would surely believe the “sky is falling.” But what is really happening here?
Ten months ago, on June 20, 2022, I published a blog entitled Medicaid Sick with Long Covid. The article highlighted the extreme cost of Medicaid coverage as a direct result of extending the Covid pandemic declared emergency. As a condition to receive extra money from the federal government to cover Medicaid expenses, they are not permitted to disenroll Medicaid beneficiaries who would otherwise be ineligible. In other words, no matter how much their financial situation improves, they must still receive Medicaid benefits.
At that time, a study by the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) estimated 98 million Medicaid enrollees, including as many as 23 million people no longer eligible (by normal Medicaid eligibility standards.) That’s nearly one in three Americans receiving Medicaid benefits!
I said at the time: “Medicaid is supposed to be a healthcare system for low-income Americans who cannot afford their own private insurance. The enrollment of Medicaid has skyrocketed ever since ObamaCare was instituted in 2014 when eligibility criteria were expanded. Now, with this Covid Public Health Emergency declaration, the rolls of Medicaid continue to escalate, regardless of financial prosperity. This is clearly just another way the left wants to bring more and more Americans under the umbrella of government-controlled healthcare. It’s a back-door to socialized medicine. This is just another example of a government handout that was intended to be temporary, but now the Democrats want to make permanent. (see Making ObamaCare Temporary Subsidies Permanent)
What is the cost of this expanded Medicaid to the taxpayers?
My response then was, “By October, 2022, “ineligible enrollees will cost taxpayers nearly $16 billion per month,” the FGA predicts, “with states picking up nearly $6 billion of those costs when the public health emergency ends.” State officials would be wise to think through what to do next, and remember that every dollar spent on an ineligible Medicaid beneficiary is a dollar that’s not spent on other priorities, including those who need help the most.” This high additional burden on taxpayers has now continued nearly another year.
The hospital industry and these otherwise ineligible Medicaid enrollees are the ones who have reaped the greatest benefit from this government largesse. Now we are supposed to feel sorry when this government handout is taken away? Regardless of what the hospital industry spokesmen say about the state of the hospital industry, in my town all the hospitals are expanding in a wave of building campaigns that tell the real story of their financial situation.
Ms. Armour’s report verifies my impressions. She says, “The pandemic and pause on disenrollments meant robust growth for the five national companies with the largest Medicaid managed care business. Enrollment grew by 38.3% to 41.6 million, from 3/31/20 to 6/30/2022, according to a report last year by the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute. For the three companies for which information is available – Centene Corp., Molina Healthcare, Inc., and UnitedHealth Group Inc., Medicaid revenues increased by 40%, from $31.8 billion to $44.4 billion over that time.”
It’s about time that those whose who have achieved improved financial status stop abusing taxpayers by continuing to claim financial hardship and those hospitals who have made enormous profits from this situation stop pretending the sky is falling.
