Proponents of adding able-bodied adults, including many working-age men, to Oklahoma’s Medicaid program promised it would solve virtually all the state’s health-care woes. Rural hospitals would suddenly be lavishly funded. State government would be flush with cash. Health outcomes would improve on a skyrocketing trajectory.
Obviously, none of those things has happened despite expansion having been in place for five years now.
A key plank of Obamacare (the federal “Affordable Care Act”) allowed states to expand Medicaid programs to include able-bodied adults and not just the medically needy.
When expansion was narrowly approved by a public vote in Oklahoma in 2020, everyone knew it would require the diversion of up to $300 million annually in state tax dollars. But advocates called that a bargain since federal tax dollars would cover 90 percent of costs.
Obviously, it meant little to the average citizen if they pay for expansion with taxes paid to the state or taxes paid to the federal government, but that’s the kind of argument that too often passes for logic in politics.
But now the folly of buying that argument is becoming apparent.
