NY Post: Cut Medicaid More

An inflammatory take on Medicaid from the NY Post Editorial Board, but one which provides the simple facts about the explosive increase in federal Medicaid spending since 2000.  Be certain to go to the original story and look at the spending graph they posted:

https://nypost.com/2025/05/23/opinion/republicans-arent-coming-close-to-cutting-medicaid-as-much-as-america-actually-needs/

Republicans aren’t coming CLOSE to cutting Medicaid as much as America actually needs
By Post Editorial Board - May 23, 2025

It’s a sign of how cock-eyed the Washington debate has gotten that Republicans are nervous about the slight slowdown in Medicaid-spending growth in the “Big Beautiful Bill.”

If anything, they’re not cutting Medicaid anywhere near as much as they should.

As the nearby chart shows, Medicaid outlays have positively skyrocketed these last 20 years: The feds spent $160 billion in fiscal year 2003; $591 billion in 2023 — over 3½ times as much.

State-level spending, meanwhile, rose from $108 billion to $280 billion — still a huge rise, but far less drastic.

What’s basically gone on?

Democrats steadily pushing toward universal health coverage at taxpayer expense, with Republicans sometimes pausing the march.

It’s Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for all” plan, except using the program originally intended to cover the poor, not the one designed for the elderly.

In the process, Medicaid’s grown from covering the poor to covering the near-poor and even the not-really-poor-at-all — in the process displacing private insurance more than it’s actually expanding the share of the population that’s covered.

That displacement has been sped up by the way the ObamaCare law and countless other progressive moves have made the private insurance market ever-more dysfunctional.

Also added in: illegal immigrants, as well as legal ones who aren’t supposed to become public charges.

All in a program so poorly designed that the only two major audits done in recent years both suggested that a full quarter of the spending is improper — whether on “beneficiaries” who don’t actually qualify, to “providers” who don’t, or in a truly vast amount of outright, criminal fraud.

Dems don’t want to discuss any of these ugly details; instead, they fall back on treating any opposition to their drive as “kicking people off health insurance.”

Hence their endless claims that the BBB “will deprive 13.7 million poor and vulnerable Americans of health insurance.”

In fact, the bill’s extremely modest reforms (eventually) do things like deny coverage to illegal immigrants, reduce federal subsidies for states to give Medicaid to people above the poverty line, require more frequent eligibility checks and impose a “work requirement” of just 80 hours a month on able-bodied recipients.

What’s wrong with insisting that the able-bodied work to receive public charity?

Or cracking down on how states like New York and California openly use Medicaid accounting scams to grab extra billions a year from the feds?

All too many Republicans flinch from trying to make that case; a few even grandstand by copying Democrats’ dishonest arguments.

And so, as the Cato Institute’s Dominik Lett notes, Medicaid has been the fastest-growing part of the federal budget this past decade because its “funding scheme actively rewards overspending, resulting in programmatic bloat, wasted taxpayer dollars, and fraud.”

It costs the taxpayers more than does national defense.

The House-passed “Big Beautiful Bill” barely begins to change Medicaid’s course; as the Senate takes up the measure, cross your fingers that it’ll do more to rein in this madness — not less.

The most recent GAO Medicaid audit referred to in this editorial:

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-23-105881.pdf

MEDICAID PROGRAM INTEGRITY
Opportunities Exist for CMS to Strengthen
Use of State Auditor Findings and
Collaboration

<snip>

Medicaid—a joint, federal-state program that finances health care
coverage for low-income and medically needy individuals—has grown
substantially. In fiscal year 2022, Medicaid served an estimated 82 million
beneficiaries at an estimated cost of $516 billion to the federal
government. Medicaid’s size and growth present challenges for both the
federal government and states, which share responsibility for overseeing
the program. For example, Medicaid improper payments—payments that
should not have been made, that were made in incorrect amounts, or that
have insufficient documentation—have generally grown in recent years
and pose a significant threat to the integrity of the program. In fiscal year
2022, Medicaid improper payments were estimated to total nearly $81
billion, representing over 15 percent of all Medicaid payments. Due to
these and other challenges, we have identified Medicaid as a high-risk
program since 2003.

<snip>