Romney plan would cut $1.7 trillion from Medicaid

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Sarah Kliff at Ezra Klein's Wonkblog writes Study: Romney-like plan cuts $1.7 trillion in Medicaid:

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney pointed to his Medicaid funding cuts during Monday night’s debate as one way to help balance the budget.

The Kaiser Family Foundation is out this morning with a deep dive into a plan that looks a lot like Romney’s. The big takeaway: Medicaid funding would be reduced by $1.7 trillion, with hospitals and nursing homes seeing payments fall by hundreds of billions of dollars.

Kaiser modeled a Medicaid block grant plan, where each state gets a capped amount of money to spend on its Medicaid population. That amount would grow 1 percent faster than inflation, the same target that the Romney campaign set, as did House Republicans in 2012.

Under that growth target, Medicaid funding would drop by $1.7 trillion between 2013 and 2022. About half of that cut would come from repealing the health care law’s Medicaid expansion. The other half would come from reducing payments to states for the Medicaid patients they already cover.

The Kaiser study also looks at how many people Medicaid could cover with this reduced funding. The most important thing to focus on here is what’s in the red box, which looks at what would happen to the people receiving Medicaid right now if this plan were in place.

There are 17 million Americans who would lose coverage under the Romney plan to repeal the health law’s Medicaid expansion. This is the population at the very top of the two bars on the right.

Everything below that represents the people eligible for Medicaid coverage right now. If Medicaid costs keep growing as quickly as they have in the past, Kaiser estimates that the Republican budget would cover 20.5 million fewer Medicaid enrollees.

Of course, Team Romney said the Kaiser study is not exactly the Romney plan. States will experiment with new ways to provide better health care at a lower cost, and eliminate inefficiencies in the program, blah, blah, blah. In other words, no details but wild speculation: "it could happen."

Romney’s proposed Medicaid funding cuts would make most of the state “innovations” he claims to be supporting impossible.

Don't buy a pig in a poke.