JBE's Medicaid Expansion has Louisianans dropping their private plans for "free" insurance

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If any state can serve as the poster child for the problems associated with ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion, it’s Louisiana, which joined the expansion in 2016, after Democrat John Bel Edwards became governor. An audit released last year exposed ineligible Medicaid beneficiaries, including at least 1,672 people who made more than $100,000. But Louisiana’s Medicaid expansion has revealed another waste of taxpayer funds, both in the Pelican State and nationwide: the money spent providing coverage to people who already had health insurance.

Via a public-records request, the Pelican Institute obtained data demonstrating that thousands of Louisiana residents dropped their private coverage to enroll in Medicaid under the expansion. A spreadsheet compiled by the Louisiana Department of Health put the count between 3,000 and 5,000 people a month, and that doesn’t count those who enrolled in Medicaid first, then dropped private coverage.

When asked about the spreadsheet, Medicaid officials stated in an email that the Health Department “stopped producing” the data in late 2017 when it discovered its vendor’s information “was limited to [third-party liability] during the period of Medicaid enrollment.” Because the vendor couldn’t track beneficiaries before or after their Medicaid enrollment, the spreadsheet arguably underestimated the number of people dropping private coverage to enroll in Medicaid.

The Health Department’s internal spreadsheet information comports with other coverage estimates. A survey by Louisiana State University researchers found that, from 2015-17, enrollment in private insurance fell precipitously among low-income Louisiana residents eligible for Medicaid under the expansion. The number of people covered by private health insurance declined by tens of thousands, even as Medicaid enrollment skyrocketed by more than 141,000.

That masses of Louisiana residents canceled their private coverage to enroll in “free” Medicaid should surprise no one. In 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jonathan Gruber, who later became an architect of ObamaCare, concluded that some coverage expansions would see rates of “crowd-out”—government programs squeezing out private insurance—approaching 60%. Eight years later, Louisiana’s Legislative Fiscal Office estimated that crowd-out would cost taxpayers between $900 million and $1.3 billion over five years. Because enrollment in Medicaid expansion vastly exceeded initial projections, the true cost may rise far higher.

Federal budget analysts have yet to quantify the effect of crowd-out on Medicaid expansion—but they should, because estimates suggest that Washington is spending billions annually funding Medicaid for people with prior health coverage. Montana officials recently released a study boasting of 8,700 workers who would have employer-sponsored coverage but for Medicaid expansion, claiming that expansion provided “cost savings to businesses” of up to $114 million. Only in a bureaucrat’s mind would more government spending, taxes and government dependency represent “cost savings.”

In response to the Louisiana audit, the state recently purged more than 30,000 ineligible people from the rolls. Health Secretary Rebekah Gee claimed the action demonstrated how she and Gov. Edwards “want to make sure that only those that need Medicaid have Medicaid.” But good stewards of taxpayer dollars, upon receiving preliminary reports of people dropping coverage to enroll in Medicaid, would have demanded better data and fashioned policy solutions to address the problem. The Louisiana Department of Health did neither and stopped compiling the data.

Generations of Louisiana politicians, since Gov. Huey Long in the 1930s, have claimed that fostering an economy rooted in government dependence will lead to prosperity. But the more than 67,000 residents who have left the state in the past three years alone see a stagnant economy and a slowly sinking state. Louisiana can do better, and other states thinking about Medicaid expansion should think again.

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