Earlier this month, the Heritage Foundation built and published a chart that ran out the direct costs of a Medicaid expansion with the “savings” the state could expect from now until 2022. This chart does not include the $1.6 billion in costs associated with the expansion’s so-called “woodwork effect,” whereby those currently eligible for the existing Medicaid program but not yet enrolled would become enrolled as a result of the Medicaid expansion. That fact makes this chart essentially a best-case cost-benefit scenario for a program whose costs, again, have not really been engaged by Medicaid expansion proponents. “No plan” for those costs is not good enough, as this chart bears out.
