As this article notes, North Carolina may receive an additional $1.1 billion in federal Medicaid funds if the Obama administration goes ahead with its economic "stimulus" package next year.
The report written about in the article makes the claim that pumping federal dollars into North Carolina's already bloated "Cadillac" Medicaid system will somehow "create" more than 20,000 jobs. As I've written before about the fallacy of government spending creating jobs, I'll leave that aside for now.
I will, however, comment on this quote in the article:
economically," said Adam Searing, director of the North Carolina Justice
Center's Health Access Coalition. "Making sure more working families and their
children have access to medical care must be a top priority. Using these new
funds to expand access would be an important step."
Once again, left-wingers like Searing intentionally conflate "access to medical care" with insurance coverage. Being enrolled in a government funded reimbursement program does not guarantee "access" to medical care.
As I documented before, over the last seven years North Carolina has seen a 28 percent increase in Medicaid recipients, while experiencing a 61 percent decline in Hospitals treating Medicaid patients and a 23 percent decrease in physicians accepting Medicaid patients. In other words, a lot more people chasing after fewer and fewer providers.
By cramming more people into the Medicaid system, we will not be guaranteeing them "access to medical care," rather we will be piling more people into a bureaucratic nightmare where long wait times and endless searches for a doctor to treat your sick child is the norm.
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