Medicaid grew beyond the population it was to serve

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<p>By Jon Fleischman, Special for CalMatters</p>
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				<figcaption>A Medi-Cal recipient gets her arm treated at the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in Los Angeles on July 26, 2022. Photo by Pablo Unzueta for CalMatters</figcaption></figure>
<p>This commentary was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.</p>
<p>Guest Commentary written by</p>
<p>Re: “Medicaid cuts stand to hit everyone (yes, even you). Here’s why”</p>
<p>A recent CalMatters story warned that Medi-Cal cuts will raise costs for the privately insured. The reporting was solid, but it skipped the question that actually explains why any of this is happening.</p>
<p>The federal government is $40 trillion in debt and runs annual deficits north of $1.8 trillion. Medicaid has been one of the fastest-growing pieces of that pile for a decade. It has expanded well beyond the population it was built to serve. </p>
<p>Nobody in the story asked what happens if that growth keeps up for another 15 years. The story needed that context and didn’t have it. Part of the reason: Every source quoted has a direct stake in more Medicaid funding, from the hospital association to academics to advocacy groups.</p>
<p>The story’s framing feeds the same growth problem. It treats work requirements as self-evidently harmful because verifying eligibility creates friction. That’s fair. Bureaucracies are blunt. But any means-tested program has to periodically confirm the people receiving benefits still qualify. A safety net that checks nothing indefinitely doesn’t stay targeted at the people it was built for — it just grows.</p>
<p>Closer to home, the pattern is the same: Economists predict the federal cuts will cause a 1% to 2% premium bump, roughly $500 a year for a family. The bigger, more immediate hit is a new state tax on health plans Sacramento just passed, running about $100 a person. Lawmakers did that while everyone watched Washington. </p>
<p>The story also invoked Martin Luther King Jr.- Harbor Hospital’s 2007 closure, which was about patient safety, not funding.</p>
<p>None of this means uninsured and underinsured Californians don’t matter. But you cannot seriously discuss Medicaid spending without asking whether its trajectory is sustainable. At nearly $40 trillion in national debt, that question isn’t optional — for California or for Washington.</p>
<p>This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.</p>
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