{"id":139564,"date":"2026-02-20T02:09:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T02:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/139564\/"},"modified":"2026-02-20T02:09:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T02:09:11","slug":"hochul-is-letting-medicaid-costs-soar-to-buy-political-support-from-big-health-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/139564\/","title":{"rendered":"Hochul is letting Medicaid costs soar \u2014 to buy political support from Big Health Care"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the fourth year in a row, Gov. Kathy Hochul<\/a> has used the word \u201cunsustainable\u201d to describe her own Medicaid budget<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Give her credit for honesty \u2014 but not sound fiscal management.<\/p>\n

Over the four annual budgets on her watch, the state\u2019s share of Medicaid costs has soared by 60%, or roughly five times inflation.<\/p>\n

Her latest proposal would add another 10%.<\/p>\n

With federal aid included, total Medicaid spending in the next fiscal year<\/a> would be $28 billion higher than when Hochul took over \u2014 and that\u2019s before the Legislature makes its inevitable additions.<\/p>\n

So what are those billions buying for the people of New York?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not more coverage: Medicaid enrollment is coming down, as it should be in the post-pandemic period.<\/p>\n

Nor is the quality of care noticeably improving: The average federal rating for New York hospitals remains stuck in the basement at 2.5 of 5 stars, making the state 48th among the 50.<\/p>\n

What Hochul is mostly buying is political peace: The more tax dollars she pours into Medicaid, the less election-year blowback she can expect from the deep-pocketed health-care lobby and its legion of allies in Albany.<\/p>\n

Of course, that means cutting corners on one of her most important duties as governor, which is to manage the sprawling Medicaid program for the maximum benefit of patients and taxpayers.<\/p>\n

Instead, she\u2019s prioritizing the interests of the health-care industrial complex, which means higher fees, bigger subsidies and less accountability.<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s proposal includes $1.5 billion to cover fee boosts for hospitals and nursing homes<\/a> and another $1 billion for health-care capital grants.<\/p>\n

Hochul is claiming her spending hikes are needed to make up for cuts in federal health funding, but that argument won\u2019t wash.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For one thing, the changes enacted in President Donald Trump\u2019s One Big Beautiful Bill Act merely slowed the growth of Medicaid spending<\/a>, rather than cutting it in absolute terms.<\/p>\n

Plus, some of its key provisions \u2014 including a work requirement for able-bodied recipients \u2014 don\u2019t take effect right away.<\/p>\n

For now, New York\u2019s federal Medicaid funding is expected to go up, not down, in the next fiscal year, by $3 billion or 5%.<\/p>\n

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One program that will take a hit is the Essential Plan, which provides taxpayer-funded coverage to people just above the income cut-off for Medicaid.<\/p>\n

The OBBBA drew a harder line against health subsidies for non-citizens, including legally present immigrants who make up close to half of the Essential Plan\u2019s 1.7 million enrollees.<\/p>\n

State officials are expecting to lose $7.6 billion of the federal funds that have, until now, paid the program\u2019s entire cost.<\/p>\n

Yet Hochul is not proposing to backfill that loss. Instead, she\u2019s seeking Washington\u2019s permission to tighten eligibility rules and dip into reserves of unspent federal aid \u2014 a strategy that would save Albany from putting up a penny of its own.<\/p>\n

If Washington goes along, Hochul\u2019s budget would still likely pump more than $130 billion in state and federal funds into its combined health programs, an all-time high.<\/p>\n

Since becoming governor, she has directed more new money to Medicaid than to all other programs combined.<\/p>\n

That will not prevent health-care lobbyists from demanding even more, and selling the Legislature on the idea that their industry is in a \u201ccrisis\u201d due to funding \u201ccuts\u201d \u2014 even though it\u2019s practically the only part of the economy that\u2019s hiring.<\/p>\n

As New York City Comptroller Mark Levine pointed out this week, the city would have lost 38,000 jobs last year if not for the 71,000 jobs added by the health-care and social-services sector.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Paragon Health Institute flagged New York as an \u201cextreme outlier in the employment of home health aides\u201d \u2014 most of which draw their wages from Medicaid.<\/p>\n

The state has 314 aides per 10,000 residents, three times the national average.<\/p>\n

Hochul ought to be tapping the brakes on runaway Medicaid spending, and making sure taxpayers are getting value for their massive investment.<\/p>\n

She paid at least lip-service to that idea in 2023 when she appointed a high-powered Commission on the Future of Health Care, supposedly to guide the drafting of her Medicaid budgets.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She gave the commission until the end of 2024 to write its first report.<\/p>\n

It hasn\u2019t been heard from since.<\/p>\n

Bill Hammond is a senior fellow of health policy at the Empire Center.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the fourth year in a row, Gov. Kathy Hochul has used the word \u201cunsustainable\u201d to describe her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":139565,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[10447,153,1948,426,11538,13912,7050,9,24,55,54,56,299,3610],"class_list":{"0":"post-139564","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-comptroller","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-hospitals","11":"tag-kathy-hochul","12":"tag-legislature","13":"tag-lobbyists","14":"tag-medicaid","15":"tag-new-york","16":"tag-new-york-city","17":"tag-new-york-city-headlines","18":"tag-new-york-city-news","19":"tag-ny","20":"tag-opinion","21":"tag-public-health"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139564\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/139565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}