Opinion: Time to federalize Medicaid

The Supreme Court's Obamacare decision has moved another conservative into my corner on Medicaid. As I argued in my most recent TRB column ("States of Confusion") Chief Justice John Roberts's opinion inadvertently pushed the state-federal Medicaid program toward outright federalization by weakening federal control over the program. The federal government already provides a majority of Medicaid's funding, and under the Obamacare expansion the feds will initially provide 100 percent of the funding for the newly-eligible before ratcheting that down to 90 percent. Yet this expansion, nonsensically, was deemed by the Court unduly coercive and burdensome.