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Required Reading – August 9 Evening Update

Required reading from around the web of the best, most interesting, or most though provoking things we’ve read:

Goldwater Institute: Medicaid expansion leads to unintended consequences, new Goldwater Institute report finds

“A new report out today from the Goldwater Institute provides a cautionary tale to states considering an expansion of Medicaid: Arizona’s experience shows that Medicaid expansion had unintended consequences that contradicted many experts’ rosy predictions.

The Arizona Medicaid Expansion Experience: Beware the Peddlers of Cost-Shifting Claims tells the story of Arizona’s decision to enact Medicaid expansion and how it worked—or didn’t work—in practice. ‘Arizona bought the promise of Medicaid expansion largely on the basis that it would ease so-called ‘cost-shifting’ claims—that hospitals were passing their uncompensated care costs to private payers resulting in higher insurance premiums,’ said Goldwater Institute Director of Healthcare Policy Naomi Lopez Bauman,. . . . ‘But if one is to believe these claims, our study shows that the cost-shifting is even worse today. Once Arizona expanded Medicaid, hospitals were able to flex their muscles and extract higher prices from all payers.’ Total charges for all payment groups (public and private) increased between 2007 and 2016, but Medicaid charges in Arizona’s emergency departments alone increased more than 300 percent. ‘States that are considering expanding their Medicaid programs should study what happened in Arizona,’ said Goldwater Institute Executive Vice President Christina Sandefur, another of the report’s co-authors.”

Read more at the Goldwater Institute.

Mangual: Six Mass Shootings in One Weekend

“Over the course of a deadly weekend on Chicago’s South and West Sides—during which 74 people were shot, 12 of whom were killed—there were, according to the Chicago Tribune, six shootings that ‘injured four or more people in a single attack,’ the largest of which ‘wounded eight people.’ In other words, there were six ‘mass shootings,’ according to the increasingly common definition of that term, in Chicago in just three days. The Windy City’s weekend violence has not received anywhere near the level of national attention that would have been generated had those ‘mass shootings’ occurred at suburban high schools, malls, or movie theaters. Calls for stricter gun-control laws follow every high-profile mass shooting; the weekend’s carnage in Chicago prompted similar demands from civic leaders and pundits. Yet the city has strict gun laws, and even when police enforce those laws diligently, the city’s liberal anti-gun caucus doesn’t always back them up. […] According to a January 2017 study by the University of Chicago Crime Lab, of those arrested for a homicide or shooting in Chicago in 2015 and 2016, ‘around 90 percent had at least one prior arrest, approximately 50 percent had a prior arrest for a violent crime specifically, and almost 40 percent had a prior gun arrest.'”

Read more at City Journal.

Enjeti: Police Capture Illegal Posing With ‘Daughter’ He Was Raping

“U.S. officials have arrested an illegal alien for multiple counts of rape after he tried to gain entry to the United States with a child he claimed was his daughter, a DHS official said in a Tuesday statement. A DHS official noted that the illegal alien, Ramon Pedro, arrived with a young girl he claimed was his daughter at the Ysleta Port of Entry in Texas in mid-April. After Pedro and his claimed daughter was hospitalized for tuberculosis testing in July, U.S. authorities discovered she was not only not related to him in any way but was being systematically sexually abused by him. […]  Pedro’s arrest highlights a central concern of U.S. authorities as large numbers of Central American migrants arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border with children, which authorities say is a way to flout U.S. law.”

Read more at Daily Caller.

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