Move would make business sense
As a business owner, if you found out you could leverage your resources and receive matching dollars at a rate of $9 for every dollar you invest, would you do it? What if it meant you could hire more people? What if that investment also reduced your costs in other areas? What if the benefit from that investment was actually more than a billion dollars each year?
People often say government should be run like a business. But when it comes to choosing common-sense solutions, such as accepting federal funds to cover the uninsured, these solutions become mired in political philosophy, leaving practical business-like calculations out of the mix.
If Oklahoma were to accept federal funds to cover the uninsured, possibly through the public/private partnership Insure Oklahoma program as we have proposed, the economic benefit would be in the billions to our state each year. According to an analysis by an Oklahoma State University economist in 2016, if Oklahoma had accepted federal funds for health care coverage from 2017 to 2021, more than $14.5 billion would have been injected into our state’s economy and more than 24,000 health care-related jobs would have been created. And because more people would get treatment earlier, including substance abuse and mental health treatment, acceptance would reduce the overall cost of health care delivery in Oklahoma. We all pay when the uninsured delay treatment and then seek care in the most expensive setting, the emergency room.
And we’re all in this together. Injecting these dollars into health care is a win for education, corrections and mental health. The notion that expanding health care coverage would take money away from other areas, such as education, simply isn’t true. Schools and communities suffer when citizens don’t have access to vital health care services. When our citizens don’t have access to mental health coverage, our jails and prisons, unfortunately, become the default. And an injection of federal dollars into health care frees up state money for other agencies.
The reality is that hospitals must also be run like businesses in order to survive and continue to provide life-saving services. When a hospital closes in a small rural community, it is devastating. The community not only loses critical health care access, but also jobs, physicians, clinics and other important health care services. Then, unable to attract new industry and residents, that community begins a downward spiral.
There is a direct correlation between states that have expanded Medicaid and fewer rural hospital closures. For example, look at Arkansas. In states that have expanded Medicaid, the number of working individuals with no health insurance dropped by twice as much as states that didn’t expand. As our tax dollars go to these states to shore up their health care, Oklahoma now has the second-highest number of uninsured in the United States.
Oklahomans applaud when federal funds come back for transportation and military projects and the subsequent jobs are created. Why is this any different for health care? Accepting federal funds to cover the uninsured makes good business sense. It’s the right thing to do for hard-working Oklahomans who need a hand up, not a hand out.