A Step In The Right Direction

A new law is going in to effect on July 1st that says that every recipient of Medicaid will have to provide proof of United States citizenship. Anyone who applies for coverage after June 30th will also have to provide documentation of citizenship.

There are currently about 50 million Medicaid recipients. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that 35,000 people will lose coverate by 21015. Only 35,000? I'm willing to bet that the number of illegal aliens getting coverage is far higher than that. I can't prove it, but with 12,000,000 illegal aliens in this country, only having 35,000 on Medicaid sounds very low. Perhaps they are just trying to say that the new rules will be difficult to enforece or the citizenship checks won't be terribly thorough.

The usual suspects are of course screaming that it will cause hardships for too many people. What these people don't want to acknowlege is that governemnt funded health care is one of the primary reasons that insurance and health care costs are so expensive anyway.

As it is, prices are high because of lousy insurance policies and people visit the doctor for unecessary reasons simply because it is so cheap for them to do so. If they were paying for it out of their own pocket, people wouldn't go to the doctor every time they get a sniffle and insurance costs would be lower.

At least an attempt is being made to clean out some of the ineligible medicaid recipients. Call me a pessimist though, I don't think it's going to make much of a difference and exception after exception will be added back until it ends up just like the current system.