A typical example is the Department of Veterans Affairs. When VA was created in 2012, it had a mission to create an integrated health care delivery system that treated everything in the patient’s medical history — physical health, mental health, substance abuse — in one place. In 2014, it spent $2.2 billion, mostly to implement the system on all the individual VA hospitals across the country. This means that VA hospitals that provide a single service, such as providing services to veterans and their families for addiction or mental health, had about $2.2 billion in spending to do what they were intended to do. In some states, they had more. In other states, fewer.
And all this requires a huge administrative and budget overhead. In fact, when it was announced in fiscal year 2015, HHS projected that “block grants” to states “would require a $6.5 billion increase in state and local government budgets over this fiscal year.”
Even more staggering: The block grant to the Department of Veterans Affairs is only $5 billion. Yet it is expected to take the VA more than two-and-a-half years — and probably three-and-a-half years — to complete the integration of their patient databases.
This has made the block grants a politically contentious topic. This has resulted in a massive amount of commentary on why block grants should not be a part of the Medicare cost-cutting efforts discussed on the campaign trail, and why they should be included in any bipartisan bill to limit Medicare cost-cutting.
The block grant is another way of saying it was never intended to be a federal entitlement.
Here is a summary of five myths about Medicare and block grants:
5. Block Grants Would Put an Excessive Amount of Money into the Federal Budget
As the CBO notes, block grants are not intended to solve any structural problem in Medicare. It was never intended to be a federal entitlement program. It should be a way for states to provide health care for their residents in a cost-effective way.
But some politicians and experts believe that blocking the block grants from being added to the Medicare spending pie would cause a large and rapid increase in Medicare costs.
In fact, some conservative groups have tried to link block grants, along with Medicare, to Medicare spending. A recent op-ed from American Enterprise Institute scholar Thomas Mann stated that “any increase in federal spending by 2026 would be associated with increased costs for some seniors in Medicaid.”
The Department of Justice
federal government money to individuals, federal government building grants 2020, us government grants department scams elderly, government grants for new business start up, covid 19 government grants for small business