Obamacare's Medicaid expansion hurts the poor

April 29, 2013

Urging Oklahoma’s policymakers to show “compassion,” some leaders of the state’s Religious Left last week called for expansion of the Medicaid program as allowed for under Obamacare.

“Liberalism, of course, professes to speak for ‘the poor,’” the great Catholic essayist Joseph Sobran once observed, “even though, given a choice between the poor themselves and a program whose real effect is to hurt the poor, it will choose the program.” Is it really “compassionate” to put more people in a program that, as health-care researchers Avik Roy and Grace-Marie Turner point out, “has the worst health outcomes of any insurance program in the developed world”? Would it not be more compassionate to give them the dignity of having their own insurance policy and their own Health Savings Account?

Providentially, on the same day the religious liberals called for Obamacare Medicaid expansion, the good folks at Reason.tv who gave us “Oklahoma Doctors vs. Obamacare” released a new video showing how Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion will hurt the poor. I encourage you to take a look below. Meanwhile, in his latest Journal Record column (“Beware of the Barzini offer"), OCPA distinguished fellow Andrew Spiropoulos continues to warn of Obamacare’s Medicaid trap and to suggest patient-friendly alternatives.