Perspectives on Medicaid

The editors of Bloomberg leap to the defense of Medicaid:

Whatever the problems with other parts of Obamacare (chiefly, rising premiums in the state insurance exchanges), Medicaid expansion has worked. Rolling it back now would hurt state budgets, the health-care industry and, most of all, the newly insured.

To place the issue in a little perspective here are the ten states with the largest Medicaid enrollments, what percentage of the state’s population that represents (based on Census Bureau figures), and I’ve color-coded the states not participating in the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid:

State	Medicaid/CHIP Enrollment	Percentage of total state population
California	11,843,081	31%
New York	6,412,390	33%
Texas	4,730,940	18%
Florida	3,644,673	19%
Illinois	3,114,000	24%
Ohio	3,003,170	26%
Pennsylvania	2,854,944	22%
Michigan	2,273,867	23%
North Carolina	2,004,486	20%
Washington	1,781,499	26%

To refresh your memory, Medicaid is a shared federal-state program with federal payment rates depending on the state’s per capita income, i.e. wealthier states pay more.

BTW, that calculation of which states are “givers” and which “takers”, i.e. the ROI of the states based on federal taxes paid in the state vs. federal monies received? Most calculations that I’ve seen don’t include SSRI, DI, Medicaid, or Medicare. If you find a source that calculates state “dependency” that includes SSRI, DI, Medicaid, and Medicare, and other federal spending, tell me about it and I’ll crank that into my table.