Expanding Medicaid

Expanding the Medicaid rolls is Obamacare’s primary way of dealing with the uninsured.

The law offers politicians the opportunity to pad Medicaid rolls because it promises 100 percent federal funding until 2018, and then 90 percent of the cost thereafter.

In the past, states determine eligibility rules, but this expansion puts the federal government in control.

This expansion of Medicaid is an ambush of monumental proportions. It is deliberately designed to destroy health insurance companies, enlarge the number of people on taxpayer-paid health care, and enslave the states to the president’s Medicaid bureaucracy.

Any state that falls to the temptation of federal dollars to expand free health care deserves the bankruptcy that will inevitably occur.

A federal government promise of “free” dollars is as ephemeral as the promises it made to our American Indians.

The crushing national debt will eventually force Congress and the president to choose between Social Security, federal pensions, Medicare and Medicaid. Which of those entitlements is easiest for the national government to duck?

Those of you who chose Medicaid get the point. Once Medicaid is expanded, the states will be faced with obligations so expensive that public schools, roads, prisons, etc., will be at risk. Medicaid expansion is a “siren’s song.”

A lot of Montanans who don’t currently have health insurance, largely because they can’t afford it, are about to be covered in whole or part by federal tax dollars for three years. After those three years the state of Montana will have the burden of paying 10 percent of the cost of the program.

We have about 70,000 people who might benefit.

If we choose not to let them, people living in some other state will have the money spent on them instead and about 70,000 Montanans will be forced to continue to hope that time will heal them, or to go to an emergency room when it’s clear that they are getting worse, and/or that the pain is too great to endure.

This is not to say those who are against the expansion are hard-hearted, but I do suspect that there are a fair number of them who are misled.

Some say the federal government will renege and stick us with a bill that we can’t afford, that we might be faced with having to pull back on something that we have come to embrace.

I say better to have had insurance and lost it than never to have had insurance at all. When reality conflicts with ideology, isn’t it time to think some more?