Morning Bell: The Obamacare Burden To Your State Budget

Conn Carroll / November 12, 2010

Facing a $25 billion deficit for their next two-year budget cycle, Texas lawmakers are considering closing the gap by dropping out of Medicaid. “This system is bankrupting our state,” State Representative Warren Chisum told The New York Times. “We need to get out of it. And with the budget shortfall we’re anticipating, we may have to act this year,” he said.

And Texas is not alone. American Legislative Exchange Council director of the health and human services Christie Herrera tells NYT: “States feel like their backs are against the wall, so this is the nuclear option for them. I’m hearing below-the-radar chatter from legislators around the country from states considering this option.”

Medicaid already eats up a huge share of state budgets. In Texas, for example, more than 20 percent of the state budget is spent on Medicaid. The crisis facing states across the country is that Obamacare forces states to massively expand their already burdensome Medicaid rolls. Starting in 2014 states must expand Medicaid to all non-elderly individuals with family incomes below 138 percent of the federal poverty level. At first, Obamacare picks up the first three years of benefit costs for expansion. But in 2017 states begin to shoulder a larger and larger share of these benefit costs, maxing out at 10 percent by 2020.

But that is just the benefit costs. Obamacare does not pay for any of the costs necessary to administer the expansion of the Medicaid rolls, rolls that are expected to increase by approximately 50 percent in states like Nevada, Oregon, and Texas. The Heritage Foundation’s Ed Haislmaier and Brian Blase found that just the administrative costs of the Obamacare Medicaid expansion will cost almost $12 billion by 2020. As Heritage visiting fellow Lanhee Chen details, some states are beginning to add the benefit and administrative costs together, and the picture isn’t pretty: (more…)