Democrats’ push to massively expand Medicaid over the past several years has turned the program into something nearly unrecognizable.
A series of reports have outlined the growing list of problems at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), including improper payments, healthcare funds being used for non-medical expenses and able-bodied adults receiving funds meant for Americans who may desperately need it. Former President Joe Biden’s CMS massively expanded Medicaid benefits during his sole term, driving Medicaid spending up from $734 billion at the beginning of his term to $871.7 billion in 2023.
“The big thing that’s sort of missing is [Medicaid’s] role of covering able-bodied adults in this,” Edmund Haislmaier, a health care policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Medicaid was originally set up to cover what we would call vulnerable enrollees, basically people who could not work and could not expect to have other sources of income or [medical] coverage. So you’re talking about poor children, low-income senior citizens, and disabled people. That is the core focus, and it’s also been expanded to include poor pregnant women over the years. What happened with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is it was further expanded [Medicaid] to include able-bodied adults below a certain income level.”
A provision under the ACA, which was signed into law by former President Barack Obama in March 2010, called for Medicaid to be expanded to provide coverage for adults under age 65 with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty level. Roughly 35 million able-bodied adults were enrolled in Medicaid programs while not working as of May 2023, according to estimates from the Foundation for Government Accountability, a conservative think tank.
Similarly, the Obama-Biden administration also oversaw sweeping expansions to Medicare coverage alongside Medicaid by abolishing a rule in 2014 preventing Medicare from funding sex-change surgeries. Obama’s administration additionally expanded coverage for sex-change procedures in 2016 through their interpretation of Section 1557, a non-discrimination provision of the ACA, which helped pave the way for Medicaid funds to be used to fund sex-change operations in certain states in recent years.
If it wasn’t for all the Medicaid fraud, there would be plenty of money. Perfectly able bodied people who are 100% able to work and pay for insurance like the rest of us, sit back on their ass and let the working tax paying citizens pay for them. Recipients of Medicaid and all other government funded freebies should be throughly investigated, not just go by the lies they tell to get all the free handouts.
“A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”