It’s innocent enough but a story in today’s Dispatch, “Expansion of Medicaid could impose costs on Ohio,” could be used as an example of why many taxpayers get upset, or at least disappointed, with “the news.”
As the Senate looks to expand Medicaid as part of its health care reform efforts, it looks like it will cost Ohio more money in the long term. This is a nice gesture – everybody wants to expand health care — but is problematic on so many levels, the discussion of which I won’t delve into here. Now it’s just about the reporting and what a couple of officials were quoted as saying.
Here are the pertinent quotes from the story:
the key U.S. Senate health-care overhaul package could cost Ohio $922 million in additional Medicaid spending
The Finance Committee’s bill attempts to cushion the burden on states by picking up most of the additional costs in the first five years
In Ohio’s case, the federal government would pay 95 percent of the additional costs
Ohio would still have to spend
does not say whether the federal government would continue to pay
Strickland said that he wants “a health-care package that is inclusive and provides for all citizens,” but he added that if Medicaid is expanded, he hopes to “see the federal government assume the greater portion of the costs, if not the total costs.”
Medicaid is a joint state-federal program created by Congress in 1965 that pays for health coverage of the poor and for long-term nursing care
The federal government normally finances
the federal government’s stimulus package is supplying extra Medicaid money
Ohio pays more than $12 billion a year for Medicaid.
revision that would have the federal government finance all the costs
a spokeswoman for Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said that when the bill reaches the Senate floor, Brown “is going to be fighting to make sure that states like Ohio with high unemployment rates receive an increased share from the federal government.”
In all the references to costs, those paying the bill are referred to as the “federal government,” “Ohio,” the “finance committee,” even “Medicaid” itself. But in all these cases those paying the costs are the American taxpayers. That is how government gets “its” money and how “it” can “pay for” or “fund” “spend” or “share.”
This is not a slam on anybody’s “well-meaningness.” But in order to be accurate and fair, journalists and politicians would do well to acknowledge that it is the American taxpayer who, willingly or reluctantly, is footing the bill for whatever “Washington” and the “50 state governments” decide to “finance.”
