Fiscal Disaster Looms For Medicaid Under ObamaCare

And this, too, is a feature of O-Care, not a bug (via Newsmax Insider):

The healthcare reform bill signed by President Barack Obama will impose burdens on financially strapped state governments’ ability to pay for Medicaid and could result in “a human and fiscal disaster.”

That’s the view of Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and president of the American Action Forum, and Paul Howard, director of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Medical Progress.

Writing in City Journal, they outline the devastating effect ObamaCare will have on Medicaid, the joint federal-state program for low-income, uninsured Americans.

Even before ObamaCare goes fully into effect, the program is beset with difficulties. Medicaid often pays just 70% of what Medicare pays doctors, which itself is 20% below private rates.

As a result, more than half of primary-care physicians and 35% of specialists either limit the number of Medicaid patients they see, or refuse to accept new ones, the authors disclose. That means recipients must often wait before receiving a diagnosis or treatment, which can have deadly consequences.

Another problem: Medicaid currently consumes about 20% of state budgets, and the federal payout boosts the deficit. Federal and state governments will spend an estimated $466 billion this year on Medicaid, and under ObamaCare “Medicaid will spend an additional $443 billion by 2019 — hardly evidence of the cost control that Obama promised for healthcare reform,” Holtz-Eakin and Howard observe.

ObamaCare defenders point out that the federal government will pay 100% of the new costs for several years after 2014. But that will leave states liable for $21 billion in new costs by 2020, not including up to $12 billion in additional administrative costs.

Yet another problem: There are eleven million uninsured Americans who are eligible for Medicaid but have not signed up. The individual mandate requiring everyone to carry insurance or pay a penalty will likely push these people into Medicaid. And these enrollees would not be covered under the federal matching rate dictated by ObamaCare, but under the pre-ObamaCare rate, which “varies by state but is much more onerous” for the states, the City Journal article notes.

The authors propose several reforms they say would help free states from “Medicaid’s ruinous funding scheme.”

For one, states could be given more power to control Medicaid costs without losing federal matching dollars. “Washington would remove all strings from the program, so states could try different approaches in covering the low-income uninsured,” the authors say.

Another proposal is to let people eligible for Medicaid use their funding to purchase private health insurance.

And the United States could move to an interstate market system in which people could purchase healthcare coverage from any state.

None of which The One will stand for.  Which is why if the SCOTUS hasn't thrown out O-Care per Judge Roger Vinson's lines by the end of next year, it'll be a huge 2012 presidential campaign issue, and B.O. will be stuck with defending it, which his left-wing extremism - not to mention his hard-left base - will demand.

In short, either ObamaCare will be terminated, or the Obamidency will.

God willing, it'll be both.  Because if they don't perish, America as we have known it for over two centuries will.