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Would you be shocked to learn what Obamacare is doing to state budgets?
// Personal Liberty Digest™
Remember all those Republican governors who held out on joining Obamacare and expanding Medicaid? They claimed no amount of matching federal money could offset the immense state-level costs.
To no one's surprise, it's turning out they were right — more right than even they might have predicted.
Not only would Obamacare, even if it had followed its ideal-scenario sales pitch, have been too expensive for state revenues to offset; it's even worse now that the numbers aren't adding up. Obamacare's projected sign-up rate has gone way off script; and in the Medicaid-expanded states, the subsidized enrollments are crippling.
"New ObamaCare enrollees and costs have exceeded estimates and threaten to swamp budgets," a headline in The Wall Street Journal warns:
The AP says that California expected 800,000 new enrollees after the state's 2013 Medicaid expansion, but wound up with 2.3 million. Enrollment outstripped estimates in New Mexico by 44%, Oregon by 73%, and Washington state by more than 100%.
This has blown holes in state budgets. Illinois once projected that its Medicaid expansion would cost the state $573 million for 2017 through 2020. Yet 200,000 more people have enrolled than were expected, and the state has increased its estimated cost for covering each. The new price tag? About $2 billion, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Enrollment overruns in Kentucky forced officials to more than double the anticipated cost of the state's Medicaid expansion for 2017, the AP reports, to $74 million from $33 million. That figure could rise to $363 million a year by 2021.
In Rhode Island, where one-quarter of the state's population is now on Medicaid, the program consumes roughly 30% of all state spending, the Providence Journal reports. To plug this growing hole, Rhode Island has levied a 3.5% tax on insurance policies sold through the state's ObamaCare exchange.
Rhode Island approved a 2015 budget of $8.67 billion. How much did it spend on Medicaid in 2014? Nearly $2.5 billion. And that was with the federal government's help.
If you live in one of the holdout states, did your newspaper of record blast your governor for declining to sign on with Obamacare? Did you see editorial after editorial ignoring the fiscal crisis that Obamacare promises to state budgets, only to make moral judgments on how deeply your red-state governor hates the poor?
And now that the cat's out of the bag, is that same paper of record vindicating your governor's decision? The federal contribution to state Medicaid funding is a time-released product with an expiration date. And if states are having funding trouble now, when part of the money's still free, just wait until they're floating the entire bill on their own.
The post Would you be shocked to learn what Obamacare is doing to state budgets? appeared first on Personal Liberty®.
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