Megyn Kelly calls out Obama for lying about how many people got Medicaid because of Obamacare...

Spoiler: It's a lot less then 4 million.

New study: Medicaid beneficiaries use emergency rooms more than the uninsured...

It isn't by a small amount either. Medicaid beneficiaries use emergency rooms 40% more than the uninsured. This is the opposite of the rational for Obamacare. We were told getting people insurance would cause them to use the emergency room less and save money. That was a liberal fairy tale.

Via Reason:

A new study of Medicaid beneficiaries in Oregon makes a strong version of this case. The study, published today in the journal Science, finds that adult Medicaid beneficiaries rely on emergency rooms about 40 percent more than similar uninsured adults.
“When you cover the uninsured, emergency room use goes up by a large magnitude,” said Amy Finkelstein, a health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who served as a lead investigator on the study, in an MIT press statement accompanying the study.
There were no exceptions to the trend. “In no case were we able to find any subpopulations, or type of conditions, for which Medicaid caused a significant decrease in emergency department use,” said Finkelstein.
We’ve seen real-world evidence that Medicaid increases emergency room utilization before, in states like California. But the Oregon study should settle any lingering debate.

Obamacare victory: Eight-and-a-half times as many people sign up for Medicaid as private insurance in Washington...

This is what victory looks like for Obamacare supporters...

Via NRO:

Obamacare’s defenders often point to states like Washington to prove that the law is succeeding. However, the Evergreen State is signing up vastly more people for Medicaid than for private insurance.
Through the first two months of enrollment, Healthplanfinder, the state’s health-care exchange, has enrolled 176,468 Washingtonians in coverage. Over 91,000 are newly eligible for expanded Medicaid and more than 66,000 were currently eligible but were not enrolled. That leaves only 18,131 residents who purchased private policies.
Altogether, that means that eight-and-a-half times as many people have signed up for Medicaid as have enrolled in private insurance.

CBO: Obamacare to add 9 million to medicaid rolls...

It doesn't add any new doctors...

SAN DIEGO — Dr. Ted Mazer is one of the few ear, nose and throat specialists in this region who treat low-income people on Medicaid, so many of his patients travel long distances to see him.
But now, as California’s Medicaid program is preparing for a major expansion under President Obama’s health care law, Dr. Mazer says he cannot accept additional patients under the government insurance program for a simple reason: It does not pay enough.
“It’s a bad situation that is likely to be made worse,” he said.
His view is shared by many doctors around the country. Medicaid for years has struggled with a shortage of doctors willing to accept its low reimbursement rates and red tape, forcing many patients to wait for care, particularly from specialists like Dr. Mazer.
Yet in just five weeks, millions of additional Americans will be covered by the program, many of them older people with an array of health problems. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that nine million people will gain coverage through Medicaid next year alone. In many of the 26 states expanding the program, the newly eligible have been flocking to sign up.

Keep on reading…

Obvious: People aren't signing up for Obamacare. They are signing up for free Medicaid...

Free stuff is always popular.

Via The Washington Post:

The first month of the new health law’s rollout reveals an unexpected pattern in several states: a crush of people applying for an expansion of Medicaid and a trickle of sign-ups for private insurance.
This early imbalance — in some places, nine out of 10 enrollees are in Medicaid — has taken some experts by surprise. The Affordable Care Act, which expanded Medicaid to cover millions of the poorest Americans who couldn’t otherwise afford coverage, envisions a more even split with an expanded, robust private market.
“When we first saw the numbers, everyone’s eyes kind of bugged out,” said Matt Salo, who runs the National Association of Medicaid Directors. “Of the people walking through the door, 90 percent are on Medicaid. We’re thinking, what planet is this happening on?”

Not so shocking: Maryland signs up 82,473 residents for free Medicaid, 3,100 to pay for Obamacare

If this percentage (96% Medicaid) hold up nationally, Obamacare is dead. I wouldn't be surprised to see  similar numbers from other states. Free stuff is very popular. Having your health insurance premium doubled to pay part of someone else medical bills, not so much. 

This Friday night news dump via Hot Air: 

More than 3,100 Maryland households have chosen to enroll through the state’s online marketplace for health insurance…The state also says 82,473 residents are signed up to be automatically enrolled in Medicaid coverage on Jan. 1.

I would be very curious how many of those 3,100 who signed up through the state exchange got a subsidy and how much. My guess is most of them got a large subsidy.

Did you know Planned Parenthood in Texas was recently forced to pay $4.3 million for Medicaid fraud?

If you didn't know this it's because the lamestream media won't report it...

Via Newsbusters:

In the first week of February 2012, the Big Three networks lunged to the defense of Planned Parenthood when the Susan G. Komen Foundation (very temporarily) withdrew its donation to abortion giant (about $680,000 the previous year). Network reporters whacked Komen, promoting “outrage and disappointment engulfing the Internet.”
But Mollie Hemingway of Get Religion pointed out that Planned Parenthood in Texas was recently forced to pay the state of Texas $4.3 million for Medicaid fraud. Where was the “outrage and disappointment” engulfing the media? The networks didn’t notice. Even the local newspaper coverage was terrible.
Hemingway noticed two small wire-service bulletins and ten reports from pro-life and Christian websites represented the media coverage.
Good for Reuters, I guess? Their story frames the fraud charge not as part of a national fraud problem for the abortion provider but as just the latest in a battle between Republican legislators and the abortion provider. But, again, at least they mentioned it. As for the Associated Press, their story is seven sentences long, includes no quotes, and could not be drier or less interesting if it tried.
It didn’t come up in my Google search but I thought I’d see about any stories in The Houston Chronicle. Well, that newsroom did report on it, sort of.
There’s a whopping four-paragraph story headlined “Planned Parenthood finalizes $4.3 million lawsuit settlement.” That was an update of the earlier story they ran — the seven-sentence AP story that said the settlement was $1.3 million. Way to put those local resources to work, fellas!
Keep reading…

Stupid: AZ Gov. Jan Brewer vetoing all bills until Obamacare medicaid expansion passes...

It's time for Jan Brewer to go...

Via Mediate:

Making good on a threat to veto all legislation until the Arizona legislature approved a 2014 budget and passed Medicaid expansion, Brewer shredded five bills, including one allowing people to sue over violations of religious freedoms, and another detailing plans for failing schools.

Brewer was brazen over the cause: “I warned that I would not sign additional measures into law until we see resolution of the two most pressing issues facing us: adoption of a fiscal 2014 state budget and plan for Medicaid. It is disappointing I must demonstrate the moratorium was not an idle threat.”

The governor savaged her state’s legislature, which she said had been in session for 130 days without passing a budget. “We have just five weeks until the end of the fiscal year,” Brewer wrote, “by which time it is necessary that the state of Arizona have a new budget in place in order to assure there is no suspension of critical services or programs.”

The Arizona Senate cobbled bipartisan support for the Medicaid bill last week, but the law has stalled in the House. Read more here...

Report: Medicaid pays up to $2 billion annually to mostly pay for illegal immigrants anchor baby deliveries...

This story makes me so upset I feel like a mosquito at a nudist colony. I know I what to do, but I can't decide where to start...

Via The Daily Caller:

Even though federal law largely bars illegal immigrants from obtaining Medicaid coverage, the program annually pays out more than $2 billion in free emergency coverage that mostly goes to illegal immigrants, according to Kaiser Health News.

The vast majority of the total emergency care reimbursements cover delivering babies, Kaiser reports.

Based on a Kaiser data analysis of the states believed to have the greatest populations of illegal immigrants — including California, New York, Texas, North Carolina, Arizona, Illinois and Florida — more than 100,000 people annually receive emergency care that is reimbursed by Medicaid.

California, Kaiser’s analysis showed, receives approximately half of the annual $2 billion Medicaid expenditure category.

That category of Medicaid also covers some homeless people and legal immigrants who have been in the country less than five years — and are therefore mostly ineligible for Medicaid, according to Kaiser.

“We can’t turn them away,” Joanne Aquilina, the chief financial officer of Bethesda Healthcare System in Boynton Beach, Fla., told Kaiser.

Keep on reading…

Citizen journalist James O'Keefe uncovers Medicaid Fraud (video)

It isn't that James O'Keefe is the world's best investigative journalist. The fact is what he is doing is too easy. The problem is the mainstream media won't even take a look because they don't want to make Democrats and Obama look bad.

Via WND:

Posing as Russian drug smugglers who drive an exotic, $800,000 sports car and hire out their underage sister as a prostitute, O'Keefe's operatives reportedly applied for Medicaid assistance for their father with the Franklin County Department of Job and Family Services, where government employee Traci Daniels told the applicants to omit listing their expensive car as an asset and report their line of work as "babysitting."

ObamaCare will put 16 million more Americans on Medicaid and Make Their Patient Outcomes Worse

Obamacare care will extend coverage to 32 million Americans according to Democrats. Half of that extended coverage will come by adding 16 million people to Medicaid rolls. Unfortunately for them, many times Medicaid patients have poorer outcomes than those with no insurance at all.

Reason reported:

Avik Roy makes a frequently overlooked point: Numerous studies suggest that Medicaid, the federal-state partner program that provides health coverage to low-income individuals, produces sub-par health outcomes. And that’s not only when compared with private insurance. In numerous studies looking at health outcomes for patients with specific maladies, Medicaid recipients fare worse or no better than those who have no insurance at all. And the cost for those outcomes is enormous; in 2008, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers, Medicaid accounted for more than a fifth of total state spending. Care to take a guess where fully half of the health insurance expansion in ObamaCare comes from? That’s right: According to the CBO’s projections, 16 million individuals are expected to enter Medicaid by the end of the decade. In some cases, that means that individuals who were previously on private health insurance will end up being shifted to Medicaid.

Actuaries for Medicare and Medicaid: 14 million will lose employer-based health care coverage

Government actuaries for Medicare and Medicaid have released a bombshell report confirming almost everything Republicans said about the downside of passing Obamacre health care reform. 14 million Americans will lose employer-based health care coverage. The health care cost curve will be bent up, not down, $389 billion 10 years. 18 million Americans will be forced into Medicaid and 15% of all Medicare providing doctors will become unprofitable as a result of Obamacare's payment reductions. A separate report this week from the CBO found 4 million Americans will pay $1000 in penalties annually. Obamacare is a disaster of biblical proportions to the American health care system.

Government Releases New Numbers on Obamacare Showing Costs Will Skyrocket (video)


Hat tip Gateway Pundit.

Another Mayo Clinic Quits Taking Medicare

Isn't one of the ways to expand coverage in the democrat's health reform bills to expand Medicare and Medicaid? If you are on Medicare, don't plan on getting the best medical care in the country.

Bloomberg reported:

Mayo Clinic Cutting back on Medicare and Medicaid Patients due to Underpayment

President Obama has praised the Mayo Clinic for having the best quality and lowest cost health care in the country.

"Look at what the Mayo Clinic is able to do. It's got the best quality and the lowest cost of just about any system in the country," Obama said in Minneapolis this month. "So what we want to do is we want to help the whole country learn from what Mayo is doing. . . . That will save everybody money."

President Obama wants to "help the whole country learn from what Mayo is doing." Well Mr. President, the Mayo Clinic is cutting back on Medicare and Medicaid patients because the reimbursements Democrats plan to cut are already too low.

Mayo officials said Monday that the two moves were "business decisions" that had grown out of longstanding concerns about what it sees as underpayment by Medicare and Medicaid....

..."It simply is the reality of the health-care business, and how are we going to be able to continue our mission when these payments are so far below what it costs to provide the care."

If Obamacare passes, we may all be soon be denied access to high quality health care.

Baucus Bill Will Expand America's Worst Health Care Program: Medicaid

America's worst government run health care system is medicaid. The Baucus bill will shove up to a total of 25% of the population into the Medicaid program within 10 years.

The more we inspect Max Baucus’s health-care bill, the worse it looks. Today’s howler: One reason it allegedly “pays for itself” over 10 years is because it would break all 50 state budgets by permanently expanding Medicaid, the joint state-federal program for the poor. The reason this saves money is Medicaid's price controls are even tighter than Medicare's. Forty percent of U.S. physicians won't accept Medicaid.

Governors are angry at Senator Baucus for the method he uses to make his version of health care reform pay for itself over 10 years. Some of the cost is shifted to state budgets.

About 59 million people are on Medicaid today—which means that a decade from now about a quarter of the total population would be on a program originally sold as help for low-income women, children and the disabled. State budgets would explode—by $37 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office—because they would no longer be allowed to set eligibility in line with their own decisions about taxes and spending. This is the mother—and father and crazy uncle—of unfunded mandates.

Why is Medicaid America's worst government run health program? The reimbursement rates are even lower than Medicare. Forty percent of U.S. doctors won't take Medicaid and drugs are usually not covered.

As for the poor uninsured, they'll be shunted off into what Democratic backbencher Ron Wyden calls a "caste system." While some people will be eligible for subsidized private health insurance, everyone in the lowest income bracket will be forced into Medicaid, the country's worst insurance program by a long shot. States try to control spending by restricting access to prescription drugs and specialists. About 40% of U.S. physicians won't accept Medicaid at all.

Obama flip-flops and proposes Medicare and Medicaid cuts of $600 billion

During the election of 2008, Obama had a different opinion of Medicare and Medicaid cuts.

"It Gets Worse" Ad


Now, Obama is proposing massive Medicare and Medicaid cuts.
The Washington Post reported:

Obama has proposed trimming more than $600 billion from Medicare and Medicaid by 2019 -- including more than $300 billion in cuts unveiled in his Saturday radio and Internet address.