HotAir on this medicaid expansion:
CBS News has confirmed that in Washington, of the more than 35,000 people newly enrolled, 87 percent signed up for Medicaid. In Kentucky, out of 26,000 new enrollments, 82 percent are in Medicaid. And in New York, of 37,000 enrollments, Medicaid accounts for 64 percent. And there are similar stories across the country in nearly half of the states that run their own exchanges. …
But Gail Wilensky, a former Medicaid director, said the numbers are causing concern in the insurance industry, which needs healthy adults to buy private insurance in large numbers for the system to work.
“Either the private insurance enrollments come up somewhere around the expected amount or there’s going to be a problem. … You need a volume and you need a mix of people that are healthy as well as high users in private insurance, in order to have it be sustainable,” she said.
The Obama administration says they expected these high enrollment numbers in Medicaid because the law expands the number of low-income people who can get Medicaid, CBS News’ Jan Crawford reported on “CBS This Morning.” Supporters say this shows demand. But industry sources say that if we do not see some real turnaround soon, there could be big problems for the entire system.
The above graphic is from a WaPo article, continuing with HotAir’s commentary on the above quoting from CBS:
This prompts a question: why didn’t Democrats just expand Medicaid? Of the 30-48 million of the uninsured in America (depending on estimates), those uninsured and making less than $50,000 in household income only came to somewhere between 8 and 14 million, according to the Census Bureau in 2009. Eighty-five percent of Americans had insurance, and 87% of those were satisfied with it. Expanding Medicaid would have been costly and wouldn’t have been an easy sale — as we see with Republican governors now — but it would have been far less costly and intrusive as the Rube Goldberg contraption built by Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats, and it would have narrowly targeted the problem.
I have pointed this out before… single-payer is the goal:
An after thought. Since the DNC leadership has said — recently — the goal is single-payer… the question becomes this then: “what other area of life would a person want single payer in?” The airlines? Fast-food? Grocery stores? Car dealers? Education? Gyms?
In other words, why would someone reject a single airline, a single grocery-store (sorry weekend BBQ’ers, no more carne-asada from Vallerta), one gym, etc. — competition drives prices down and offers the best way (supply and demand) to get to the consumer what they want… but reject all that for a system that is failing in Canada, Britain, and the like?
It seems counter-intuitive that the left likes to break up large companies/corporations that get too big, and speak about/to the “evils” large companies inflict on the consumer, but then want single-payer. Odd indeed.