Medicaid ‘Empire’

Gov’t helps 7M NYers

The number of New Yorkers on Medicaid and other state public-health insurance programs has skyrocketed by 57 percent over the past decade to 7 million, according to a report released Wednesday.

More than one-third of New Yorkers — 36 percent of the state’s population of 19.8 million people — received government-funded health coverage targeted to the needy, the analysis by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli found.

That figure excludes Medicare, the federal government’s health insurance for the elderly.

Enrollment for Medicaid jumped from 4.3 million to 6.2 million from 2008-09 to 2017-18.

New York also took advantage of additional federal dollars available under former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act to create a new state health-insurance program to cover lower-income New Yorkers who did not qualify for Medicaid.

There are now 729,000 New Yorkers enrolled in the “Essential Plan.”

There are also 350,000 youngsters under 19 who are enrolled in the publicly funded Child Health Plus program. The figure is slightly lower than the 369,000 kids who were enrolled in 2009.

The good news, according to DiNapoli, is that the number of New Yorkers without health insurance dropped from 10.9 percent in 2008 to 4.9 percent last year — a rate that is 50 percent lower than the national average.

Spending on Medicaid, adjusted for health-care inflation, increased 19 percent. Total spending on the state’s Medicaid program was $69.4 billion last year, by far the highest in the nation.

But federal funding picked up 54 percent of the bill and covered most of the spending increase.

Spending per enrollee actually plummeted 18 percent because most of the new enrollees were healthier and did not have costly disabilities.

DiNapoli said the increased enrollment was largely fueled by a boost in federal support under ObamaCare.