Marketing medicaid: health care costs.

• Author: Suderman, Peter
• Position: Citings - Brief article

IN 2010, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the Medicaid expansion required by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would cost about $434 billion during the law's first decade. A recent paper suggests the price tag may end up being far higher.

The CBO projected that ObamaCare would add 16 million people to Medicaid, the joint federal/state program that provides medical coverage for the poor and disabled. In the October issue of Health Affairs, a team of Harvard researchers calculate that the number of new Medicaid enrollees could be as low as 8.5 million or as high as 22.4 million. Under the latter scenario, the Medicaid expansion, which the CBO said would represent about half the cost of ObamaCare, would consume nearly $1...