Going to take more than ecigs.... the State Budget Solution's stats include 'premature death' in Table 2 under "lost productivity"
which somehow is 1/3 of the smoking costs of Medicaid?
As mentioned in another thread, longer lives from smoking cessation are going to cost even more in healthcare. Although the 'argument' sounds good and probably works in our favor given what the public schools have done on 'comprehension' and logic.
This is more likely the tipping point of Medicaid bankruptcy:
"The good news, if you want to call it that, is that roughly 1.6 million Americans have enrolled in ObamaCare so far.
The not-so-good news is that 1.46 million of them actually signed up for Medicaid. If that trend continues, it could bankrupt both federal and state governments.
Medicaid is already America’s third-largest government program, trailing only Social Security and Medicare, as a proportion of the federal budget. Almost 8 cents out of every dollar that the federal government spends goes to Medicaid. That’s more than $265 billion per year.
Indeed, already Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid account for 48% of federal spending. Within the next few years, those three programs will eat up more than half of federal expenditures.
And it’s going to get worse. Congress has shown no ability to reform Social Security or Medicare. With ObamaCare adding to Medicare spending, we are picking up speed on the road to insolvency.
The Congressional Budget Office projects that, in part because of ObamaCare, Medicaid spending will more than double over the next 10 years, topping $554 billion by 2023.
And that is just federal spending.
State governments pay another $160 billion for Medicaid today. For most states, Medicaid is the single-largest cost of government, crowding out education, transportation and everything else.
http://nypost.com/2013/12/07/the-medicaid-time-bomb/
