Budget 2011: Another Taxpayer-Funded Medicaid Bailout
Kathryn Nix /
As President Obama’s recently-released budget for 2011 reveals, with or without a health care reform bill, Medicaid stands to receive a big, taxpayer-funded bailout. Again. The 2011 Budget includes $25 billion in additional funding for state Medicaid programs as an extension of the bailout that was included in the 2009 economic stimulus bill.
As Heritage analysts Dennis Smith and Nina Owcharenko argued then, depending on federal bailouts to carry Medicaid through economic hardships is bad policy.
The stimulus bill provided increased federal matching rates for Medicaid programs in all fifty states. This splurge in spending was accompanied by no caveats or strings attached to require true Medicaid reform, which is sorely needed. Instead, the federal government succeeded only in propping up the failed policies behind the broken government program, encouraging continued sluggishness in actual improvements to the system. (more…)