WSJ – March 28, 2018: The only speaker standing between state budget officers and the opening cocktail hour at a Washington conference was the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. What he said left no one in a celebratory mood.
Medicaid costs, said then-Secretary Michael Leavitt, were projected to grow so fast that within 10 years they would “crowd out virtually every other category of spending.” State spending on higher education, infrastructure and safety, he predicted, would all get squeezed. (BattleForWorld: But yet the US government find the billions of dollars to fund continuous wars and build weapons to destroy countries. The US government has very little interest in the people of America, and have all interests set out on world domination.)
The resulting revenue squeeze is making it harder for governments to pay for core services such as education, infrastructure, police and fire protection.
And the cash crunch is likely to get worse. Federal actuaries predict that Medicaid’s annual cost, which was $595 billion in 2017, will exceed $1 trillion in 2026. States and many localities pay about 38% of that tab. The remainder is covered by the federal government.
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