Brian Lear on WNC.

On WNYC. We'll follow up now on something from Governor Brian Lear on WNC.

We'll follow up now on something from Governor Hockel's Budget address last week.

It's about the challenges New York State faces from the growing cost of Medicaid.

It's an issue because so many New Yorkers lack

private health insurance and qualify for the various parts of Medicaid which is

government health insurance for people with low enough incomes for the most part.

But as the population ages, that's more and more people and health care costs per each person keep going up in Medicaid as in the private sector.

Medicaid is a big share of the total state budget.

We'll get into specifics.

New York also has among the highest per person Medicaid tabs of any state. The governor says the most of any

state. There are some other ways to look at those numbers, but it's near the top. So we'll get two

views on this. First though, here's a minute of the governor from that

speech.

Our Medicaid spending exceed our projections this year by $.5 billion dollars.

Let me explain how it happened.

First, 200,000 more people than anticipated remained on state-funded Medicaid after the federal

government ended their supplemental pandemic support.

Maintaining the coverage for these previously unenrolled residents now cost the state an additional

$400 million annually.

To make matters worse, the state is still awaiting repayment of a $1.5 billion

dollar one-time bridge loan made to financially distressed hospitals, which actually are about one third of the hospitals

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