Turning Medicaid into a block-grant program would cap federal funding to the states. Edwin Park, vice president for health policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, argues against them. Indeed, Medicaid costs less than private health insurance because it pays health-care providers less than private insurance—and this is nothing to brag about. In contrast, under a per-beneficiary cap, states would receive a fixed amount of federal Medicaid funding per beneficiary. Both proposals set a cap based on the state’s current or historical Medicaid spending, and future increases would be set at a rate slower than federal Medicaid spending is currently projected to grow.

Source: Wall Street Journal April 12, 2017 01:52 UTC