This is the Cater Daily Podcast for Monday, November 21st, 2022. I'm Caleb Brown.

The feds made it easier to stay on Medicaid during the pandemic and now it appears the

Biden administration may want to delay going back

to normal again.

What does that mean for state's ability to rein in their health care spending?

Mark Joffy is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

We discuss the ways in which the feds have put Medicaid expansion on autopilot with no clear end in sight.

During the pandemic, the federal government took several moves moves one of those was to make it

easier for folks to do what with respect to Medicaid

stay on Medicaid there's really now no mechanism for states to recheck eligibility and remove

recipients if they want to continue receiving federal matching funds.

Now to the extent that you think Medicaid is a

perfectly fine program you might have thought that that was a good thing to do at the

time giving people greater access to health care services during a sort of a dicey and uncertain time with respect

to Americans health. But where are we now with respect to Medicaid and eligibility and the amount of money that

states and feds spend on it?

Sure.

So when the pandemic started, we had 71.3 million people on Medicaid and its sister program

CHIP the Children's Health Insurance Program. Now we've just passed 90

million which means that more than one in four people in the United States is on

Medicaid. So the program has really expanded well beyond its original intent and

it's really becoming almost a single-payer health system for large parts of the American

...