Does Stacey Abrams Know about the Cost of Expanding Medicaid?

She’s back. 

Although former State House Speaker and Democratic candidate for Governor Stacey Abrams never really left, did she? 

Her advocacy group’s new ads calling for expanding Medicaid to able-bodied adults in Georgia, which accuse her former rival Governor Brian Kemp of playing politics with Georgians’ health care — are just the latest in a long string of embarrassing public efforts. 

After all, when a politician with future ambitions is more concerned with how issues influence her ratings than how many people have superior, private health coverage, who’s really playing politics with health care? 

Stacey Abrams has shown her true priorities: She cares about what will sell in a 30-second soundbite — not what will work for the next 30 years for Georgia’s patients and taxpayers. 

Medicaid expansion has always been long on promises but short on delivery. Advocates like Abrams promise relief for Georgia’s budget, help for rural hospitals, and more coverage for uninsured Georgians. 

Instead, Medicaid expansion becomes more of a Pac-Man for state budgets, accounting for nearly one in every three dollarsstates spend. 

As enrollment soars beyond state projections, states are forced to divert money away from critical priorities like schools and public safety. Hospitals struggle under the weight of lower Medicaid reimbursement rates in expansion states. 

And the majority of new enrollees aren’t uninsured — they’re hardworking Americans who already have private insurance, but are still shifted into welfare. 

Abrams may listen to the pundits on MSNBC demanding Medicaid for All. But she doesn’t seem to listen to the small business owners in Georgia already struggling with a worker shortage who know what more welfare would mean for the economy. 

Expanding Medicaid would double down on dependency. Medicaid was designed to provide health care for the truly needy, expansion would pull an entirely new population of childless, able-bodied adults out of the workforce. After all, even before the pandemic, 52 percent of able-bodied Medicaid expansion enrollees did not work at all.  

That’s why states that have already expanded Medicaid under Obamacare are scrambling to rein in Medicaid costs. But thanks to a Biden administration disinterested in state flexibility, states have been prohibited from using powerful tools like work requirements for able-bodied enrollees. 

In fact, Washington is moving in the opposite direction of policies that strengthen the workforce. Instead, they are looking for ways to tighten the handcuffs. The Democratic-led reconciliation bill would impose an impossibly high fine on expansion states which try to back out of the raw deal. 

If expansion under Obamacare were the panacea its supporters say it is, why does the federal government need to threaten states to keep them from backing out? 

Abrams knows a thing or two about the power of “suppression.” She became a national figure for spreading misinformation about voter suppression in the wake of her gubernatorial loss to Governor Kemp. 

Now, she’s advocating for worker suppression.

As dubious and destructive as her claims of voter suppression were in undermining faith in our public institutions, it seems she was only getting started. 

After all, her new ads claim that “Georgians are dying” because the state hasn’t expanded Medicaid to able-bodied adults. But hospitals in Georgia are already required to provide emergency care to all patients, regardless of their ability to pay.

Georgia’s Medicaid program is already incredibly generous. The state spends more than one-fifth of its budget providing free health care to two million children, seniors, individuals with disabilities, and pregnant women. 

So, the benefactors that Georgia taxpayers have in mind for Medicaid expansion are already assisted by healthcare policies other than Medicaid expansion in the Peach State. 

As Abrams prepares to run again, Georgia should run from her latest idea — expanding Medicaid to able-bodied adults under Obamacare. 

Scott Centorino is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability. Stefani E. Buhajla is the communications director at the Foundation for Government Accountability.