As if we needed another example of how poorly conceived the federal health care “reform” plans are, there’s some very interesting food for thought from two senior fellows at the Heritage Foundation. According to them, if the health care legislation passes Congress in anything like its current form, states would be better off ending the voluntary partnership known as Medicaid.
If states did so, “their collective savings would be $725 billion over the 2013-2019 period, but they would exceed $1 trillion over 10 years.”
In Virginia alone, withdrawl from Medicaid would save the state’s budget something on the order of $9 billion over ten years. Even if 90% of current long-term care programs continued to be funded by state dollars.
Which is why in addition to the Virginia Health Care Freedom Act, legislation will be introduced during the 2010 General Assembly session to end Virginia’s participation in Medicaid entirely, should the federal government manage to succeed in its attempted health care take over.
This is huge; especially when coupled with ongoing nullification efforts. It could be just the trump card states need to back the federal government down. At least on this issue.
Consider the budget games being played in Washington, D.C. just to make this piece of garbage legislation look even remotely affordable. The revenue and growth projections are far too rosy, while the proposed spending cuts will never materialize.
Cato’s Michael Cannon has already shown that the true cost of ObamaCare is really more like $6 trillion over the first ten years.
Add to that an additional $1 trillion if the states reject yet another unfunded federal mandate, and somehow I don’t see our nation’s AAA credit rating hanging around very much longer.
Which makes me wonder something else.
Wasn’t there another voluntary compact in our history involving the federal government and the states?
A voluntary compact that a certain president claimed was not voluntary when several states chose to end it; resulting in the deaths of 600,000 Americans over federal tax revenues?
Oh yeah, that’s right. It was the Constitution.