New York Medicaid ‘Overdosing,’ New York Post Editorial States

With more than two million beneficiaries and an estimated price tag of $4 billion for the year, New York City is "overdosing" on Medicaid, according to a New York Post editorial. Twenty-five percent of the city's population is enrolled in Medicaid, yet only 21% of city residents have annual incomes at or below the federal poverty level, generally the income limit to receive Medicaid benefits. The "budget-busting spike" in Medicaid enrollment cannot come as a complete surprise to New York City lawmakers, who have been attempting to "chum up hundreds of thousands of recruits for the nation's most generous, and most expensive, health care program for the poor," the editorial says. The editorial notes that city officials in the late 1990s launched a recruitment drive to expand Medicaid enrollment. At one point, the state and city made an effort to reign in Medicaid spending and enrollment, the editorial states, but that ended when Gov. George Pataki (R) and the state Legislature "threw all caution to the wind," enacting reforms in 1996 and in 1999 that "[e]xponentially" expanded the size of the state's Medicaid program. More recently, Pataki created a program that gave city residents temporary, immediate Medicaid benefits following the Sept. 11 attacks. In the six weeks following the creation of the new program, 75,000 families and individuals signed up, and since then about 380,000 individuals have received benefits, the Post says. And in January, state lawmakers "rammed through another multibillion dollar expansion of the state's socialized medicine system, with most of the money targeted for health care workers," the editorial states (New York Post, 7/29). The $3 billion plan increases salaries for health care employees and restores some reductions in health services that Pataki had proposed (Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, 1/22). The Post says what is "really going on" is that politicians "are looking after themselves, of course. And after the big bucks health care workers union that's now the largest campaign donor in [the] state." The editorial concludes, "City Hall (and Albany) intentionally set out to bloat the Medicaid rolls. [And t]hey succeeded famously" (New York Post, 7/29).