Posted by
John R. LaPlante on Tuesday, July 25, 2006 1:29:39 PM
You have probably heard of the financial and demographic troubles facing Social Security. But do you know that Social Security’s problems are rivaled, if not exceeded, by government-financed health care?
Medicare is a federal program to fund health care for senior citizens. Sometimes confused with Medicare is another program called Medicaid.
Actually, Medicaid is over 50 programs, since each state and territory is free, within federal guidelines, to devise its own approach. Both federal and state taxpayers fund a bureaucracy for long-term care and acute care.
Acute care is what we think of as regular medicine, while long-term care deals with (most typically) nursing homes. Over the next few weeks, we’ll introduce you to the problems facing these programs, as well as what state-focused think tanks are doing to promote policy alternatives that advance markets and solve pressing problems.
Spending on Medicaid varies from state to state, but it often exceeds the budget for education. Given the aging of the baby boomers, this trend will only continue if the program is left unchanged.
Medicaid has been one project area of the
Flint Hills Center for Public Policy, a Wichita-based organization. Its report “What’s Wrong with Medicaid in Kansas?” (
available in PDF) offers a brief overview of the program’s flaws. Though the specifics of Medicaid vary from state to state, the fundamental problems are nationwide. This 8-page document is an easy-to-read introduction to what’s wrong with Medicaid in Kansas—and elsewhere.