Medicaid reform, now or never, GOP savings may cost NY $5B and other commentary

“Republicans would be making a terrible blunder to let” Democrats’ fear-mongering about Medicaid reform “intimidate them from fixing the program,” warns The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.Under the ObamaCare law’s Medicaid expansion, the feds pay states more for eligible “prime-age adults” than “for pregnant women, the disabled and other low-income populations.”Huh! “You won’t find many voters who think the federal government should focus scarce health resources on working-age men over poor children and pregnant women.

Yet that is what the perverse financing formula encourages.”Fact is, “the GOP can make the strong and accurate argument that fixing this bias in federal payments is shoring up the program to better serve the vulnerable,” and “Republicans may not get another opening for decades to fix the core problems in Medicaid.”The stakes for New York “are high” as Republicans eye Medicaid savings from targeting the “so-called expansion population,” notes the Empire Center’s Bill Hammond.These are under-65, non-disabled adults “with income up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level.”ObamaCare made them Medicaid-eligible, with the feds funding 90% of the costs, instead of the 50% it pays for most Medicaid recipients in New York.Republicans may make the feds’ share 50% for these people as well, which could cost New York state 6% of its funding, or $5.3 billion, based on 2023 numbers.Amazingly, such changes “would be unlikely to reduce” federal Medicaid spending for New York “in absolute terms.” They’d merely “slow growth compared to current trends.”Teachers and administrators simply “didn’t care about having kids in school” during COVID, David Zweig recalls at New York magazine; “a series of falsehoods” related to risk birthed the “fantastical list of demands” from teachers unions and others around reopening.Recall too that the American Academy of Pediatrics was “very strong...