I’ve written about dual eligibles and Medicaid before. I’m putting it up again (in an easier to read article) because I can predict, based on the riddled-with-outright-lies health care debate we had last time that this debate will also be fact-free.
This is where we spend Medicaid dollars:
Because of generally poorer health and greater needs for high-cost services, the country’s 8.8 million dual eligibles are the most expensive population within the Medicare and Medicaid programs and the most difficult to coordinate care for, according to a report issued Monday morning by the Center for American Progress and Community Catalyst.
According to the report, dual eligibles make up 18 percent of Medicaid enrollees but consume 46 percent of program spending. Meanwhile, they comprise 16 percent of Medicare enrollees but consume 25 percent of spending.
Old people and the disabled cost the most (there’s a shocker) and then there’s pregnant women and children.
Medicaid, while wildly unpopular among public intellectuals, Republican House members and media personalities, is (surprise!) actually popular with the public:
If you listen to the inside debate you would think Medicaid is America’s most unpopular program. Conservatives don’t like Medicaid on ideological grounds; it’s a government entitlement program. Providers complain about the program’s reimbursement rates. And liberals have long complained about the program’s limitations, especially the gaps in whom Medicaid covers and the large variations in coverage among states. With its joint federal-state financing and welfare-linked heritage, Medicaid is treated as fundamentally different than the two other big entitlement programs — Social Security and Medicare — and thought to have dramatically less public support.
It was against this background that one of our recent polls produced a real surprise. It turns out that the insider’s view of Medicaid is not the public’s view at all. While not viewed as favorably as Social Security or Medicare, Medicaid is actually surprisingly popular with the American people, and they resist the idea of making big cuts to the program.
When we asked in our poll which programs the public was willing to see cut by Congress to reduce the deficit, no surprise, only 8% were willing to see “major reductions” in Social Security or Medicare. But only 13% were willing to see major reductions in Medicaid, the same percentage as for public education. Sixty-four percent supported “no reductions” at all in Social Security as a way to reduce the deficit, 56% in Medicare, and 47% in Medicaid, hardly the mark of an unpopular program. Forty-six percent of independents and a little more than a third (35%) of Republicans said they would “not support any reductions at all” in Medicaid to reduce the deficit.
Paul Ryan is calling his proposal to gut Medicaid “welfare reform” because conservatives and media put a lot of time and energy into portraying Medicaid as a program that only “other people” rely on.
Medicaid is much broader than that, because it includes the elderly, the disabled, and children. I’m not surprised that most people support it. Many of them are relying on it.
Big Surprise: People Support Programs They UsePost + Comments (34)