Medicaid Biggest Insurer Is A Budget Buster Club Health

Medicaid went largely unnoticed when it first came into being in mid-1965, meriting only passing mention from President Lyndon B. Club Health Johnson at a bill-signing ceremony in Independence, Mo., Club Health that focused on the passage of the Medicare health plan for Americans over age 65.

But four decades later, Medicaid’s numbers are eye-popping. Club Health It is now the nation’s largest health insurance program, covering 59 million poor people. Club Health or one in six Americans, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It pays for 37 percent of all births in the United States and helps foot the bills for more than 60 percent of all patients in nursing homes.

That population includes some of the sickest – Club Health and most expensive – patients in the health care system. States try to clamp down on those costs, but at the risk of angering doctors, dentists, hospitals, nursing homes and drug companies that provide the services.

That flexibility means that Medicaid has become a kind of policy playground for governors Club Health. The result is that no state’s Medicaid program is exactly like another’s, leading health policy experts to say Medicaid isn’t one program, but 51.

You’ll find a great deal of basic information on a Web site maintained by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; click on Medicaid Club Health. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation offers help at Kaiser/Medicaid and Kaiser Report . The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government has compiled still more information at Rockefeller research.