Op-Ed: MEDICAID MADNESS

There was ominous news buried deep in the financial plan released last week by Gov. Paterson’s budget office: Five years hence, one in every four New Yorkers will be on Medicaid.

And that will drive the state’s Medicaid spending — at nearly $50 billion a year, already the most lavish in the land — to even more astronomical levels.

True, some of this is due to the current climate: More people unemployed means more people forced onto the taxpayer-financed medical program.

But as E.J. McMahon of the Manhattan Institute noted here last week, nearly half the growth is projected for after Paterson’s predicted end of the recession.

Moreover, the state is spending taxpayer dollars — $2 million in the current fiscal year — to streamline the enrollment process. That includes eliminating such current requirements as fingerprinting, interviews and eligibility testing.

Over the past four years, New York’s Medicaid enrollment has risen from 3.5 million to 3.7 million, meaning that one in five people here is enrolled.

This year, the number will increase to 3.98 million — and then to 4.27 million, a 7.2 percent one-year hike, in 2010-11.

By 2012-13, the figure will be 4.8 million, or one in four New Yorkers — up some 33 percent over five years.

This kind of growth is unsustainable.

Surely the very modest concessions on Medicaid spending that Paterson got this year from New York’s health-care cartel will be more than rubbed out by the program’s rapid expansion. And, don’t forget, the federal stimulus cash that’s underwriting the 2009-10 budget is a temporary injection.

Consider: The average Medicaid recipient gets about $12,500 in benefits; state and local taxpayers foot 20 percent of that bill, or about $2,500. And the average New York taxpayer forks over about $4,000 per year to Albany.

Which means, roughly, that each Medicaid recipient has his personal taxpayer.

Expanding the program is madness. But the way Albany is going, before long, every New Yorker will be on Medicaid.

The health-care cartel will love it.

But who’ll be left to pay the bill?