More than half the Empire State’s Medicaid beneficiaries are now above the poverty line, the Empire Center reports. It’s a stunning sign that politicians have distorted a program originally targeted at the poorest Americans.
More, the center reports, all the program’s recent enrollment increases come from people above the federal poverty threshold, even as the state’s poverty rate has declined. As of 2019, enrollment was above 6 million — more than a third of the population.
This is no safety net: It’s headed toward covering most of the working class and into the middle. Yet Medicaid’s well-below-market-rate payments to health-care providers makes the coverage second rate. As the report’s author, Bill Hammond, warns, New York is “prioritizing quantity of coverage over quality of care to the detriment of the vulnerable people [Medicaid] was originally meant to help.”
We don’t blame anyone for taking this taxpayer-paid coverage: The politicians have also made private insurance horrifically expensive in this state, with a host of mandates that supposedly improve coverage but drive costs into the stratosphere.
No one’s eager to go on Medicaid, but New York’s do-gooders are driving ever more of us to that last resort. What will it take for them to stop “helping”?