Most South Carolina families and employers find themselves in a healthcare No Man’s Land: They earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but struggle to pay healthcare premiums that seem to rise every year.
Executive Summary Given the focus on the disastrous launch of the Obamacare insurance Exchanges in 2013, many people don’t know that most of Obamacare’s coverage gains have come not through those Exchanges, but through a new expansion of Medicaid to able-bodied, working-age adults. Medicaid was originally intended to provide important safety net coverage to vulnerable
“For every problem,” H.L. Mencken wrote, “there is a solution which is simple, clean and wrong.” Enter Obamacare and one of the main ways that it purports to reduce the number of uninsured: putting more people on Medicaid. S.C. legislators are being pressured to do just that. The House has rejected the idea, and Gov. Nikki Haley has vowed to veto it, but it’s not dead. And if they ultimately sign on to the idea, they’ll find they’ve made a costly mistake and created a long-term fiscal problem. Specifically, some in the Legislature want to expand Medicaid eligibility to more adults during the three years the federal government covers the expansion population.
