Increased Medicare Spending Does NOT Reduce Overall Health Care Costs

It is not about state spending, Healthy states are about libertyAs Democrats push for Medicaid Expansion in New Hampsshire, and Republicans attempt to formulate their own method for doing the same, keep this in mind…  (Expansion killing Graph on the jump.)

From IJR..

The Leftist theory that adding uninsured onto a government health care plan will cause them to seek preventative care vs. the higher cost emergency room care is great in theory, but that theory falls apart in the real world.

Adding around 400,000 (and a lot more in the future) people to Medicaid will NOT reduce the US health care costs and that is easily proven with historical data.

From the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services website, I can obtain the total US health care expenditures and spending for Medicare and Medicaid (both Federal and State) since 1960 and can graph them to see if increasing spending in Medicare/Medicaid drives down the overall health care spending in the US.

It does not!

In New Hampshire they want to add tens of thousands to Medicaid, and the research that was presented to legislators demonstrated that this would cost New Hampshire taxpayers millions of dollars every year.  Here is why it will cost more.  Increasing funding of Mediciad and Medicare drives up the total cost of care in the US.  Up, not down.  Never down.

Medicare the higher total medical costs get.

The more money we dump into the plan meant to reduce costs, the higher costs go.

So the only reason to expand medicaid in NH is to make care cost more.   Any other argument is misinformation or an outright lie.

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  • Steve is a long-time New Hampshire resident, an award-winning blogger, and a member of the Board of Directors of The 603 Alliance and the National Heritage Center for Constitutional Studies. He is the owner of Grok Media LLC and the Managing Editor, Executive Editor, assistant editor, Editor, content curator, and more (yes, there's more) at GraniteGrok.com. Steve is also a former board member of the Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire, the Republican Volunteer Coalition, and has worked for or with many state and local campaigns and grassroots groups, and is a past contributor to the Franklin Center for Public Policy.

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