Tag Archives: block grants

How to Avoid a New, and Much Worse, Financial Crisis

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Is it possible for the U.S. to effectively address its enormous debt problem in today’s contentious political environment? Two weeks ago I discussed in “America’s Fourth Revolution” why the political scientist James Piereson thinks this is impossible. He is very persuasive but I think he is too pessimistic.
CaptureSince then I have discussed several different things we should do to turn around this perilous situation:

  • If spending for just Medicare and Medicaid (two very expensive entitlement programs) alone fell by 25% over ten years, as a percentage of GDP, and then stayed in line with GDP after that, the U.S. would actually have a budget surplus in 2040.
  • Just recognizing the magnitude of our debt problem would do wonders in public awareness.
  • If the Tea Party were able to grow beyond a protest movement and unite the country behind a majoritarian agenda of work, mobility and opportunity, it would be much more effective in achieving its fiscally conservative goals.
  • Another significant way to save money, and get better results at the same time, is to turn over more and more programs to the states. A good way to do this is with block grants to the states for federal programs in such areas as welfare, education and Medicaid. This would give the states more flexibility to get the job done in an efficient and cost saving manner.

What we need to do to turn our debt situation around is to greatly shrink our annual deficits below their current level of about $450 billion per year. If the debt is growing slower than the economy, then it will shrink as a proportion of the economy. This is what happened after WWII (see above chart) and it needs to happen again now!

How to Control Federal Spending III. Reform Medicaid!

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One of the many controversies involving the Affordable Care Act concerns the expansion of Medicaid to cover low income people up to 138% of the federal poverty level.  As Robert Samuelson reported in the Washington Post a few days ago, “The Real Medicaid Problem,” 24 states have refused to expand Medicaid coverage even though the federal government will pay 100% of all additional costs until 2017.
CaptureAs Mr. Samuelson points out, the underlying issue is a matter of cost:

  • The basic Medicaid program is funded with a fixed percentage of each state’s costs paid by the federal government. This means that the more a state spends, the more is contributed by the federal government. From 1989 to 2013, the share of state budgets devoted to Medicaid has risen from 9% to 19%. This upward trend is clearly unsustainable.
  • In Medicaid, children and adults up to age 65 represent three-fourths of beneficiaries, but only one-third of costs. The quarter of beneficiaries who are aged or disabled are responsible for two-thirds of costs.
  • More than 60% of nursing home residents are on Medicaid.
  • There is no assurance that the federal share of the expanded coverage will continue at the announced rate of 90% after 2017 because the federal government is in much worse financial shape than are most states.

An interesting Op Ed appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal, “The Smarter Way to Provide Health Care for the Poor,” written by Mike Pence, the Governor of Indiana.  In 2008 Indiana set up the Healthy Indiana Plan to better serve low income Indianans.  It now provides Health-Savings Accounts to 40,000 low income citizens, with very good results.  Indiana is applying for a waiver to the ACA to use Medicaid expansion funds to provide HIP to all low income families up to 138% of the poverty level ($33,000 for a family of four).
Clearly, individual states, when offered the opportunity, are quite capable of coming up with innovative solutions for difficult problems.
A good way to resolve the problem of state resistance to Medicaid expansion is to fundamentally change Medicaid into a block grant program whereby the federal government contributes a specific amount of money to each state each year.  Then the states design their own programs to meet their own needs.  Block grant funding for Medicaid is a common sense approach to address one aspect of our huge fiscal problem in an intelligent way!