Reports of Medicaid demise exaggerated

“To understand God’s thoughts,” Florence Nightingale once said, “we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose.”

Clearly, the use of numbers is the easiest way to quantify the effort made to help the less needy, or, conversely, to criticize the absence of such aid. This week, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the new Senate Republican health care bill would leave 22 million more people without health insurance in 2026 than under current law, triggering Democratic predictions of death and destruction.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said the bill would kill “thousands of people.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said Senate Republicans were using “blood money” to pay “for tax cuts with American lives.” Hillary Clinton tweeted that passing the bill would make the GOP the “death party.”

Many of the estimated “22 million” people who would “lose” health insurance by 2026 under the Senate plan are people who were forced to buy it because under Obamacare, they’d have had to pay a penalty if they went without. If policyholders aren’t required to keep a plan they don’t want or can’t afford, they can either continue to keep buying it or choose not to. This is not “losing ” health insurance.

Further, as Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., has been pointing out, the CBO used an outdated estimate to determine the “loss” of coverage in the individual market from year to year under the Senate plan. When the most recent estimates from January are used, the number of Americans with individual health insurance would remain unchanged between 2017 and 2018.

Yet the shadowy “22 million” number still lurks, threatening to send the entire bill to its grave. Consider the CBO score a pre-existing condition.

It doesn’t help that news reports criminally misrepresent the CBO finding, stating flatly that 22 million people will “lose” insurance under the GOP plan. Or when ostensibly neutral news articles announce that Medicaid will be “slashed” or “gutted.”

In fact, the Senate bill merely slows Medicaid’s rate of growth. Federal Medicaid spending would still increase $73 billion by 2026 — and while that’s well below the scheduled amount of spending under Obamacare, conservatives maintain the current trajectory is unsustainable.

Republicans have quibbled about the details of the bill and the manner in which it was conceived. The critique from the left basically amounts to, “MAKE PEACE WITH YOUR GOD.” And so far, the apocalyptic rhetoric has been working. According to a new USA TODAY poll, only 12% of Americans approve of the Senate health bill.

The Senate bill was created under a suspect, secretive process that deserves criticism. And it certainly could use some freemarket reforms to help drive down health care costs.

Now that it’s in the public discussion, let’s all hope a more realistic debate will stop the CBO before it kills again.