by Charles Katebi The director of Wyoming's Department of Health, Tom Forslund, recently sat down before the Joint Appropriations Committee (JAC) to make his plea for more spending. The biggest item by far on the agency's wish list was Medicaid Expansion, costing a whopping $268 million. How did he try selling such an expensive line item to the JAC...

by Charles Katebi Supporters of Medicaid Expansion, including Governor Matt Mead, express an unwavering belief that the federal government will actually fund this entitlement as promised. Yet Washington's promises often become unfunded mandates. Even before the end of this year it is likely that Congress will cut federal funding for Medicaid Expans...

by Charles Katebi Medicaid's allies are gearing up their expansion drive for the 2016 budget session. As usual, they're trying to convince Wyomingites that they will save big if government spends more of their money. We've heard this story before. Governor Mead, Wyoming's Hospital Association and the Department of Health all claim that Wyoming's un...

by Charles Katebi With just a few weeks until open enrollment, WINhealth has decided to leave Wyoming's health insurance exchange. The insurer hoped that Obamacare's federal bailout fund would pay for its losses. However, it only paid insurers a fraction of what it promised. Wyoming legislators rejected Medicaid expansion last year because they wor...

by Charles Katebi No single provision of Obamacare has been more disastrous than Medicaid Expansion. It's cost taxpayers billions more than promised and hurt the very people it was intended to help. Now Governor Mead wants to try yet again to expand this ruinous government program in Wyoming. Following an event at an oil recovery facility in Rivert...

by Charles Katebi When progressives make the case for Medicaid Expansion, without fail they remind their listeners that the federal government has pledged to cover 90 percent of the cost of expansion. But a report from the Foundation for Government Accountability sheds light on just how empty the federal government's promises really are. On multipl...

by Charles Katebi Throughout the debate to expand Medicaid during the 2015 Legislative Session, opponents repeatedly claimed that the federal government couldn't be trusted to keep its promise to cover 90 percent of Medicaid Expansion's costs. So it should come as no surprise that the Obama Administration has now broached the idea of reneging on it...

by Charles Katebi With just two weeks remaining in the legislative session, the forces of socialized medicine were defeated, at least for now. After losing decisively in the Wyoming Senate and finding no traction in the Wyoming House, Medicaid Expansion supporters tried to ram this policy through with an amendment to the budget bill. Amendment 31 o...

If the proponents of Medicaid Expansion get what they want, and if the SHARE Plan developed by the Wyoming Department of Health is enacted, we can - the report says - expect approximately 17,600 Wyomingites to enroll at an annual cost of $110 million. That is a cost of $6,250 per enrollee per year, or $520.83 per month. There was a point in time, n...

One of the biggest problems with tax-paid, government-provided entitlements is that government makes promises without a credible source of funding. The universal approach to entitlements is that legislators identify a problem, assume government is the best vehicle for a solution, then craft a bill, pass it into law and go home to their voters and t...