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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Medical services for the poor (medicaid) are comparatively minor, but you wouldn't know it, given how much emphasis the Republicans place on the question of the "welfare state".

I'm not sure I'd describe medicaid as "comparatively minor". Medicare is $390B, medicaid $247B ($290B including the state contributions). I guess the threshold for expenses that don't matter must bet somewhere between $290B and $390B.

http://usgovernmentspending.com/year2008_US.html#usgs30210

(Use the dropdown to select year=2008, the last year for which full data is available.)

[edit: curious why I'm being downmodded. Is posting the actual numbers so detrimental to the conversation?

edit 2: put in the federal-only numbers, thanks jbooth for pointing that out. ]

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"I'm not sure I'd describe medicaid as "comparatively minor". Medicare is $390B, medicaid $247B ($290B including the state contributions). I guess the threshold for expenses that don't matter must bet somewhere between $290B and $390B."

2009 US Federal Spending: 3,518 Billion (100%)

2009 US Defense Spending: 782 Billion (23%)

2009 US Social Security: 678 Billion (20%)

Medicare and Medicaid combined: 676 Billion (19%)

I'm not saying Medicaid is nothing; I'm saying it's not even close to Social Security or defense spending as a source of concern.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Federal_Spending_-_FY...

Compared to the size of the government, or even just the deficit, it's comparatively minor. By your numbers.

390B + 240B is over 20% of the total 2008 budget. I guess we have different definitions of "minor."

Hey jbellis, been doing some Cassandra this past week.

The original contention was just regarding medicaid -- 290 billion compared to a 3 trillion budget, with a > 1 trillion deficit. Entitlements all together add up to about half of the budget. They're big. But the original point was that nobody wants to touch medicare/SS but everyone makes Medicaid the bad guy. Makes you think they're more concerned with demographics and likely voters than budget arithmetic.

EDIT: Watches the downvotes. Chill out guys, it's just numbers. You'll win the house this fall, take it easy on HN.

Medicaid amounts to 65% of the budget deficit and about 60% of medicare. Welfare amounts to another 70%. If we cut the welfare state (i.e., medicare and welfare), we would have a budget surplus.

While I agree that medicaid is a politically easier target than medicare, it's not a small program. It's a completely legitimate target of criticism, and eliminating it would significantly improve the federal budget.

That's keeping the payroll taxes that pay for medicaid intact. So you're saying cut the medicaid program and slush the money that pays for it over to the discretionary budget (funded by income tax) to plug the hole there? Maybe put a different line item for that amount, or rejigger the tax itself into income tax? Or cut the medicaid program and kick it all towards medicare to give it a longer lifeline? Honest questions, would love to hear a clarification.

(for the record, I'm keeping it extremely civil in the numbers but find the thrust of this morally disturbing because I think there's a right to basic medical care and you can't deny it only to the poor)

Wait, 65% of the budget deficit? Your own quote has it at 290 billion dollars, that' s approximately 30% of the discretionary budget deficit. Letting alone the fact that it's part of an entirely separate budget.

The federal deficit was $377.9 in 2008. You do the math. I'll post the link again:

http://usgovernmentspending.com/year2008_US.html#usgs302

Ohhhhh, we're talking about balancing the 2008 budget.. Well that doesn't make any sense, but I'm looking forward to your answers to my questions above on the mechanics of how that would work.

(EDIT in reply: Yeah, that's fine, and I went with it, but talking about percentages of a 380 billion dollar deficit in the context of current events is just plain silly.)

From my previous post: "(Use the dropdown to select year=2008, the last year for which full data is available.)" I don't think I was unclear - jbellis certainly figured it out about 2 hours ago.

As for the specific mechanics, I'll refer you to another post in this thread which provides a number of mechanisms: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1745969

More or less any of them should work.

"More or less any of them should work"?

You want to burn a $290 billion dollar program to the ground, with consequences like "poor people don't get insulin", and you can't even be bothered to think about which top level line item should be moved around?

This is why Al Gore sighed into his microphone that time. Yeah, it lost him the election, but when are you people going to realize that studied ignorance is not the way to solve problems?

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