PPACA Will Put a Quarter of Pennsylvanians on Medicaid

There is no shortage of media coverage marking PPACA’s two year anniversary, but one statistic from the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare did grab my attention:

Instead of reforming Medicaid, the law greatly expands the program, adding over 800,000 Pennsylvanians by 2019. By the time it is fully in effect, one in four Pennsylvanians will be on Medicaid [emphasis added].

Today, nearly 1 in 5 Pennsylvanians are enrolled in Medicaid, government insurance that provides terrible care with a huge price tag. Medicaid delivers episodic treatment, provides poor preventative care, offers sub-standard services to many beneficiaries and at times harms the poor.

For example:

• Only 45 percent of primary care physicians are willing to accept most or all new Medicaid patients that come through their doors.
• Medicaid patients use ERs about twice as often as the uninsured and privately insured.
• The likelihood of getting an appointment for a child to see an otolaryngologist (ear, nose and throat doctor) is 37 percent versus the private insurance rate of 100 percent.
• The odds of dying in the hospital following heart surgery are 6.2 percent for Medicaid patients versus 5.1 percent for uninsured and 1.5 percent for those with private insurance.

The whole idea behind PPACA was to make insurance affordable for every American. But what good is insurance if you have to drive hours to find a doctor and then receive worse care than the uninsured?

Throwing more Pennsylvanians into an expensive and failing system is not the answer. The answer is healthcare freedom, whether that’s giving individuals and employers more choices by shopping across state lines and offering mandate-free plans, or encouraging consumers to take more control over their health dollars via Health Savings Accounts and list billing.

Pennsylvanians can’t endure more people dependent on crummy and expensive government insurance.