President Biden’s long overdue decision to end the Covid-19 public health emergency declaration on May 11 has exposed the big-government activists who used the pandemic to expand and entrench the nanny state.
At the start of the pandemic, the federal government passed a law prohibiting states from removing ineligible individuals from Medicaid until the emergency declaration was ended. In exchange, the federal government picked up a bigger share of the program’s cost at taxpayers’ expense. Medicaid enrollment increased by 25 percent, and the nature of the program changed from a temporary stopgap to something more permanent.
Thanks to the December budget deal, states will finally be allowed to resume checking Medicaid eligibility in April. But the public health emergency should have ended long ago. After all, it was President Joe Biden himself who, back in September, said, “The pandemic is over.” Yet Washington decided to let the emergency linger on even as Americans recognized the crisis had passed.
The reason is obvious. The purveyors of government dependency, to paraphrase Rahm Emanuel, will never let a crisis go to waste if they can use it to further their aims. The continual extensions of the emergency order were not done to enhance public health or address a true emergency but to keep in place a Medicaid expansion the president knew Congress would never make permanent. For these folks, Medicaid is an end in itself.
The prolonged emergency measure has had dire consequences. Medicaid expansion diverted billions of dollars from delivering essential medical care
