Medicaid

Conventional governing is hampering Pennsylvania’s progress. Growing state budgets combined with one-time revenue transfers and targeted tax hikes are delaying the structural reforms essential to improving the quality of life for people who live and work in Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania taxpayers shoulder the 15th highest state and local tax burden in the country. Consequently, the Keystone State has seen an exodus of working people. Unsustainable growth in state government spending has fueled this high (and growing) tax burden.

Governor Wolf is facing a budget situation more serious than any of his predecessors. His proposal includes an additional $691 million in the General Fund for DHS, bringing the department’s total to $11.9 billion. This increase accounts for nearly 89 percent of the total increase in the General Fund for all state agencies, absorbing 38.5 percent of the General Fund and 44.5 percent of all funds. If the historic pattern holds, it will be only a matter of time before Pennsylvania lawmakers w

Unfortunately, we cannot also support the governor’s “Healthy PA” initiative that would create a new taxpayer-subsidized program for hundreds of thousands of new participants in the unproven and flawed Affordable Care Act health insurance “exchange.” This plan would neither serve our neediest citizens better in the short term nor will it reduce taxpayers’ costs in the long run.

Say you’re working your way through college, supplementing student loans with a part-time job managing inventory at Wegmans. You make a decent hourly wage, but your health insurance benefits are key, saving you thousands per year in premium costs. Then, one Monday, your boss tells you part-timers are no longer eligible for benefits.

The debate in the Keystone State on the question of whether to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act looks to be ending. Governor Tom Corbett has successfully pointed out that the expansion debate is ultimately a debate between political expediency vs. economics and morality. The former counsels Medicaid expansion; the latter shows it to be a bad move for the state’s working poor as well as its taxpayers.

That's why leaders in statehouses across the country should do the right thing and follow Pennsylvania's lead. Instead of waiting for dollars and dictates from D.C. to expand a broken program, our states can save our ailing health care system by fixing Medicaid themselves.

For our fiscal health, and the health of families, we desperately need the flexibility to allow state officials to design a solution that fits the needs of Pennsylvanians-not an expansion of an already failing program.

When the governor released his budget last month, the loudest opposition hinged on Medicaid - government insurance for the poor and disabled. Advocates of expanding the program via the Affordable Care Act and its "free" federal money pointed out that the governor's decision was a heartless refusal to help Pennsylvania's poor. But this is not the case.