Dear Editor:Â
Some insights on why taxes are so high. In 2009 Missouri spent an average of $6,504 on Medicaid enrollees, of which there were 1,065,266, 18 percent of our population. This amount was 17.6 percent above the national average spending per enrollee. Nationally Missouri ranked 15th in Medicaid spending per enrollee.
Total 2010 federal and state Medicaid spending totaled $401.4 billion. Missouri spent $8.1 billion of that. Medicaid accounted for 35 percent of all state spending. No other state spends a larger percentage of its budget on Medicaid than Missouri.Â
Fifty-five percent of Medicaid money spent in Missouri is spent to provide care for children whose parents won't/can't support them. In 2009, 48 percent of all births in Missouri were paid for by Medicaid. I wait for the day when a Missouri politician will have the guts to propose a plan that provides disincentives that will reduce the number of pregnancies that result in children that the rest of us have to support. Past and current programs have dramatically increased the number of those pregnancies.
It is far past time to get the federal government, and preferably even the state government, out of the welfare business. We need to go back to the time when family, neighbors and possibly local government takes care of our own. By the way, if the federal government dropped "Human Resource" spending, other than Social Security and Medicare, it could cut our taxes by over $3,800 per person. With that money we could do a far, far better job of taking care of our own.
It is time for us to wrest control of our lives, and finances, away from the federal government. It has proven beyond doubt that it is incapable of spending our money wisely.