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Medicaid Expansion Suicide Vest
by Wyoming Liberty Group Staff
Earlier this year we saw the darkly funny story set overseas when a terrorist instructing his class on how to build and use a suicide belt, blew himself up and took his 21 pupils along with him. No one can predict exactly how many future innocent lives were saved by this academic mishap, but everyone agrees that we are probably better off without this class graduating.
Many unconsciously took comfort in the fact that this exercise in professional suicide took place overseas, and yet, this week in Wyoming's capital another group of professionals are seriously trying on another suicide vest called Medicaid Expansion. This vest, like the other one that detonates and wipes out the surroundings in a fraction of a second, does so in a budgetary explosion over several years.
It is noble to want to help our fellow Wyoming citizens who need healthcare coverage but expanding Medicaid entices people to move to your state for free healthcare, encourages businesses to break up full time jobs into part-time jobs without healthcare benefits, and liberates some people to become eligible for Medicaid by just dropping our of the workforce. Medicaid Expansion has side effects, bad side effects.
When you add a large group of consumers to a healthcare market while paying less than the cost of care, the number of hospitals and healthcare providers predictably does not increase so wait times increase. Waiting rooms get crowded as do emergency rooms. And current Medicaid beneficiaries who deeply depend on our current healthcare infrastructure struggle to get timely care. The reason they are on Medicaid is that they have no other options, unlike the new recipients who usually do.
By not paying enough to cover the cost of care, larger numbers of Medicaid recipients showing up at the hospitals accelerates their demise. Last year in the U.S. 20 rural hospitals closed (a new record) even after Medicaid Expansion in their states. Many physicians who want to see Medicaid patients acknowledge that they simply can't as it will quickly drive them out of business by not covering rent, payroll and office costs. This again demonstrates that healthcare insurance coverage does not equal healthcare.
In another interesting parallel, no one in the suicide vest class was available to give a review of the course, and similarly no Medicaid Expansion proponents can find a legislator in another Expansion state to go on the record saying what a great idea they had when it was executed. Because in retrospect, it wasn't.