Effects of Unfunded Health Care Mandates

All parts of the state, including the Jersey Shore region, will be hit hard with consequences accruing from additional medical expenses made inevitable by health care legislation commonly known as Obamacare. The Foundry has an entry titled The Obamacare Burden To Your State Budget. Medicaid is often thought of as a federal program, funded with federal resources, but the states are responsible for funding much of the costs. That burden will be made greater by Obamacare requirements which make it mandatory to expand medicaid coverage to include "non-elderly individuals with family incomes below 138 percent of the federal poverty level."

In the year 2017 and thereafter states will assume larger financial burdens related to benefit costs. The federal government will cover none of the additional administrative costs. Understandably as states begin to realize the added fiscal burdens they are becoming increasingly concerned. The author concisely put the problem in stating that, "Obamacare’s unfunded mandates are a fiscal time bomb set to explode state balance sheets across the country starting in 2014."

New Jersey is already in deep fiscal trouble. This huge cloud on the horizon is not welcome news. The no free lunch maxim has not become inoperable. To the contrary unfunded mandates are destructive to fiscal responsibility. Fiscal irresponsibility eventually adversely impacts a region's prosperity.