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Newborns & children drive Colorado Medicaid costs. A solution? Make Medicaid parents pay more.

The Independence Institute‘s Linda Gorman writes:

Health policy discussions often focus on controlling the cost of the sophisticated medical care that is provided to relatively few people. Outside of this blog, relatively few people pay attention to the impact of routine costs like the cost of an extra physician visit for each of 150 million people. This is one reason why so many people are surprised by the fact that consumer directed health plans with proper incentive structures can lower health care expenditures by as much as 20 percent without compromising health or externally rationing care. It also explains why so many Medicare commentators have difficulty understanding how the Ryan Medicare reform plan might work.

Below is a list of what officials at Colorado Medicaid consider the top 10 “cost drivers” for the state Medicaid program as shown in one of the Colorado’s budget documents. Six of the ten cost drivers revolve around labor and delivery and routine physician visits by children.  …

The performance goals given by the state Medicaid bureaucracy grandly propose containing these costs. In response, state budget staff have asked, quite sensibly, whether the Department plans to “reduce vaginal deliveries without complicating diagnoses” by reducing the number of births?

Read more: Colorado’s Medicaid Cost Drivers | John Goodmans Health Policy Blog | NCPA.org.

Here’s a simple answer to reducing the number of births: Make Medicaid recipients pay some of their own money for delivering their babies.  Adults have a right to procreate, but we don’t have a right to do so at the expense of other people, e.g., taxpayers who fund Medicaid.

Check out Colorado Medicaid co-payments. For in-patient services, it’s just $10 per day! As I’ve documented before, the poorest households can afford to pay much more than that.