Michael Leavitt called Medicaid

[EC]

Mr. States Goes To Washington
Lurking in the shadows of the administration’s high-profile campaign to privatize social security is a quieter effort to slash health coverage for the poor. In his first address as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Michael Leavitt called Medicaid - the federal/state program that provides basic health coverage to the poorest Americans - “not financially sustainable.”

Although Leavitt’s comments were somewhat obtuse (including an extended analogy involving a cul de sac, a dying girl and a character named “Mr. States"), an expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation said the bottom line is Leavitt is indicating he plans to “reduce spending on the aged and people with disabilities.”

Leavitt “repeatedly pointed the finger at state leaders” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55431-2005Feb1.html) for Medicaid’s financial problems, attributing Medicaid’s difficulties to “gimmicks” states use to game the system and increase costs for each enrollee. But that isn’t true. A detailed analysis by John Holahan, Director of the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center, in the 1/26/05 edition of Health Affairs (which is - gasp! - not available online) found that:

Increases in spending per enrollee over the period were faster than inflation but slower than increases in private insurance spending.
more--->
http://www.thinkprogress.org/


on edit, here's the link for the statement: http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/hlthaff.w5.52/DC1