New Hampshire State Senate Nixes Medicaid Expansion in Budget - Granite Grok

New Hampshire State Senate Nixes Medicaid Expansion in Budget

By a vote of 4 – 2 Senate budget writes have ‘Just said No’ to the proposed Medicaid expansion option tied to the “Eliminate Any Hope Of Affordable Care Act,” frequently misrepresented as the ‘Affordable Care Act,’ or ObamaCare.  Speaking for the majority, State Senate Majority Leader Peter Bragdon, who happens to be State Senator, said something incredibly intelligent.

“I’m not a big fan of spending a whole lot of money on something that seems to me to have some doubts as to whether or not it is effective.”

To which I would add, “Oh, Yeah- so why do we still have RGGI?”

Cheap shot.  Sorry.

Well he happens to be right in this case.  And don’t be fooled by the fools like Senator D’Allesanrdo who say things like this…

“How many times in our life do we have an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of so many people?” 

NHPR, from which I am quoting by the way, goes on to provide this to back up D’Allesandro’s remarks.

An independent study found expansion will provide roughly 60,000 additional New Hampshire residents with health coverage, and bring $2.5 billion in federal money into the economy. It comes with an estimated $27 million price tag to the state.

What really happens is the mandate expands state responsibility and all the costs that go with it by making people eligible who could probably manage just fine if they were not being incentivized to go on the medicaid dole.  Much like the expansion of SCHIP, which now covers kids in families with incomes who have no need of such coverage–up until the government finishes its ongoing process of forcing people into the program by destroying affordable care–the Medicaid expansion is designed to do the same thing.

So the state isn’t making a difference in anyone’s lives unless by that Senator D’Allesnadro means they are teaching them to be more dependent on people like him, and less dependent on themselves.  And the money is most certainly suspect.  A Federal government that spends more than twice what it takes in can and should be expected to offload these costs as soon as it possibly can.  So there will be no 2.5 billion injected into our state economy, nor any other state.   More than likely we will end up creating a huge recurring budget line item that will extract money from the state from now till the end of time, a net loss to economic activity, year after year ad infinitum.

(Any money we might get would come with sharp and painful strings that would stay long after any money stopped.  And the entire exercise, on the whole, is more like a drug pusher giving the product away for free until the addict is hooked.)

Senator Bragdon is correct in observing, even if indirectly, that it does us no good to create 60,000 dependents who may have managed well enough on their own, or could be encouraged to do so if encouraged,  rather than lie to them about an unpredictable future only to find out later that Federal dollars are whimsical things, That no amount of rhetoric will address the real needs of the victims of bait and switch advertising when the money that was never really there to begin with is suddenly gone.  His caution may be late in arriving to the party on the whole but at least it is finally here.

Whatever fiscal slack New Hampshire would be forced to pick up for the pleasure of being so foolish as to bite into this empty Medicaid expansion pie, would have to come from someplace else in a tight budget that the current crop of Democrats is already (very Likely) insisting is underfunded now.

And if we were to offer free this or expanded that, or state supported  this or that, people looking for a free ride will be more than happy to come here and or create the circumstances whereby they get to suck on those benefits;Psychological distress (all forms of distress) will always expand to meet the supply of publicly funded services available to reduce it.

The only way to reduce them is to create an environment where self-sufficiency and self reliance provide a better quality of life than being on the dole.  So instead of drooling over the prospect of a few billion in unreliable future dollars from a suspect and incompetent Federal pusher, wouldn’t it be a better idea to incentivize people and businesses to create economic opportunity an thereby address real needs with local resources and dollars instead?

It would.  But that might require less government and an open insurance market based on competition instead of all the mandates, strings, stifling Federal regulations, bureaucracies, and controls.

The Federal government is ruining the insurance market and it will take health care, and actual health down with it.  We can either ignore the signs, the history, and common sense and thumb a ride down into the crapper with the rest of them, or we could be an innovative leader in viable alternatives to the garbage coming out of Washington DC.

But before we can go there we’ll have to stop electing pin-headed Democrat governors who are more interested in inventing revenue to spend to grow government regardless of the economic situation; governors who would rather rely on out of state influence peddlers and federal dollars to make them look like they mean us well and have our best interests at heart.  They don’t.  Spending only benefits the political class, and taking Federal money is a trap and always has been; just ask Governor Maggie Hasbeen about that 800 million dollar hole her party left in the budget after the last cascade of One-time federal money came along and abruptly stopped.

It always stops, and sooner than you think.  And someone has to pay for it or fix it, and fixing it means someone that was lied to has to live without it.

Better to keep the place clean and tidy, free of Federal cobwebs, than to place a side bet we all know we eventually are going to lose in a big way.

The expansion is a trap.  Let’s hope the State Senate doesn’t back away from this unusually smart move.

Update: added links c/o Bill O’Brien.

New England Journal of Medicine: Oregon Experiment

Forbes: Four Reasons Oregon Results Worse Than They Look

 So it’s been interesting to watch their reaction to the Oregon Medicaid study, which found that the $450 billion-a-year program “generated no significant improvement in measured physical health outcomes.”

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