State and Local Fiscal Challenges: Rising Health Care Costs Drive Long-term and Immediate Pressures
Released: 2008-11-19T00:00:00

Letter

The State and Local Government Sector Faces Increasing Fiscal Challenges

Fiscal sustainability presents a national challenge shared by all levels of government. The federal government and state and local governments share in the responsibility of fulfilling important national goals, and these subnational governments rely on the federal government for a significant portion of their revenues. To provide Congress and the public with a broader perspective on our nation’s fiscal outlook, we developed a fiscal model of the state and local sector. This model enables us to simulate fiscal outcomes for the entire state and local government sector in the aggregate for several decades into the future. Our state and local fiscal model projects the level of receipts and expenditures for the sector in future years based on current and historical spending and revenue patterns. This model complements GAO’s long-term fiscal simulations of federal deficits and debt levels under varying policy assumptions. We have published long-term federal fiscal simulations since 1992. We first published the findings from our state and local fiscal model in 2007.

Our model shows that the state and local government sector faces growing fiscal challenges. The model includes a measure of fiscal balance for the state and local government sector for each year until 2050. The operating balance net of funds for capital expenditures is a measure of the ability of the sector to cover its current expenditures out of current receipts. The operating balance measure has historically been positive most of the time, ranging from about zero to about 1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Thus, the sector usually has been able to cover its current expenses with incoming receipts.

Our January 2008 report showed that this measure of fiscal balance was likely to remain within the historical range in the next few years, but would begin to decline thereafter and fall below the historical range within a decade. That is, the model suggested the state and local government sector would face increasing fiscal stress in just a few years. We recently updated the model to incorporate current data available as of August 2008. As shown in Figure 1, these more recent results show that the sector has begun to head out of balance.

These results suggest that the sector is currently in an operating deficit. Our simulations show an operating balance measure well below the historical range and continuing to fall throughout the remainder of the simulation timeframe.

Since most state and local governments are required to balance their operating budgets, the declining fiscal conditions shown in our simulations suggest the fiscal pressures the sector faces and are a foreshadowing of the extent to which these governments will need to make substantial policy changes to avoid growing fiscal imbalances. That is, absent policy changes, state and local governments would face an increasing gap between receipts and expenditures in the coming years. One way of measuring the long-term challenges faced by the state and local sector is through a measure known as the “fiscal gap.” The fiscal gap is an estimate of the action needed today and maintained for each and every year to achieve fiscal balance over a certain period. We measured the gap as the amount of spending reduction or tax increase needed to maintain debt as a share of GDP at or below today’s ratio. As shown in figure 2, we calculated that closing the fiscal gap would require action today equal to a 7.6 percent reduction in state and local government current expenditures. Closing the fiscal gap through revenue increases would require action of the same magnitude to increase state and local tax receipts.

Rapidly Rising Health Costs Drive Long- term State and Local Sector Fiscal Difficulties

Growth in health-related costs serves as the primary driver of the fiscal challenges facing the state and local sector over the long term. Medicaid is a key component of their health-related costs. CBO’s projections show federal Medicaid grants to states per recipient rising substantially more than GDP per capita in the coming years. Since Medicaid is a federal and state program with federal Medicaid grants based on a matching formula, these estimates indicate that expenditures for Medicaid by state governments will rise quickly as well. We also estimated future expenditures for health insurance for state and local employees and retirees. Specifically, we assumed that the excess cost factor—the growth in these health care costs per capita above GDP per capita—will average 2.0 percentage points per year through 2035 and then begin to decline, reaching 1.0 percent by 2050. The result is a rapidly growing burden from health-related activities in state and local budgets. Our simulations show that other types of state and local government expenditures—such as wages and salaries of state and local workers, pension contributions, and investments in infrastructure—are expected to grow slightly less than GDP. At the same time, most revenue growth is expected to be approximately flat as a percentage of GDP. The projected rise in health- related costs is the root of the long-term fiscal difficulties these simulations suggest will occur. Figure 3 shows our simulations for expenditure growth for state and local government health-related and other expenditures.

On the receipt side, our model suggests that most of these tax receipts will show modest growth in the future—and some are projected to experience a modest decline—relative to GDP. We found that state personal income taxes show a small rise relative to GDP in coming years. This likely reflects that some state governments have a small degree of progressivity in their income tax structures. Sales taxes of the sector are expected to experience a slight decline as a percentage of GDP in the coming years, reflecting trends in the sector’s tax base. While historical data indicate that property taxes—which are mostly levied by local governments—could rise slightly as a share of GDP in the future, recent events in the housing market suggest that the long-term outlook for property tax revenue could also shift downward. These differential tax growth projections indicate that any given jurisdiction’s tax revenue prospects are uniquely tied to the composition of taxes it imposes.

The only source of revenue expected to grow rapidly under current policy is federal grants to state governments for Medicaid. That is, we assume that current policy remains in place and the shares of Medicaid expenditures borne by the federal government and the states remain unchanged. Since Medicaid is a matching formula grant program, the projected escalation in federal Medicaid grants simply reflects expected increased Medicaid expenditures that will be shared by state governments. These long-term simulations do not attempt to assume how recent actions to stabilize the financial system and economy will be incorporated into the federal budget estimates in January 2009.

Considerations for Targeting Supplemental Funds to States through the Medicaid Program during Economic Downturns

The outlook presented by our state and local model is exacerbated by current economic conditions. During economic downturns, states can experience difficulties financing programs such as Medicaid. Economic downturns result in rising unemployment, which can lead to increases in the number of individuals who are eligible for Medicaid coverage, and in declining tax revenues, which can lead to less available revenue with which to fund coverage of additional enrollees. For example, during the most recent period of economic downturn prior to 2008, Medicaid enrollment rose 8.6 percent between 2001 and 2002, which was largely attributed to states’ increases in unemployment. During this same time period, state tax revenues fell 7.5 percent. According to the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, in 2008, most states have made policy changes aimed at controlling Medicaid costs.

Recognizing the complex combination of factors affecting states during economic downturns—increased unemployment, declining state revenues, and increased downturn-related Medicaid costs—this Committee and several others asked us to assist them as they considered a legislative response that would help states cope with Medicaid cost increases. In response to this request, our 2006 report on Medicaid and economic downturns explored the design considerations and possible effects of targeting supplemental assistance to states when they are most affected by a downturn. We constructed a simulation model that adjusts the amount of funding a state could receive on the basis of each state’s percentage increase in unemployment and per person spending on Medicaid services. Such a supplemental assistance strategy would leave the existing Medicaid formula unchanged and add a new, separate assistance formula that would operate only during times of economic downturn and use variables and a distribution mechanism that differ from those used for calculating matching rates. This concept is embodied in the health reform plan released by Chairman Baucus last week.

Using data from the past three recessions, we simulated the provision of such targeted supplemental assistance to states. To determine the amount of supplemental federal assistance needed to help states address increased Medicaid expenditures during a downturn, we relied on research that estimated a relationship between changes in unemployment and changes in Medicaid spending. Our model incorporated a retrospective assessment which involved assessing the increase in each state’s unemployment rate for a particular quarter compared to the same quarter of the previous year. Our simulation included an economic trigger turned on when 23 or more states had an increase in the unemployment rate of 10 percent or more compared to the unemployment rate that existed for the same quarter 1 year earlier (such as a given state’s unemployment rate increasing from 5 percent to 5.5 percent). We chose these two threshold values—23 or more states and increased unemployment of 10 percent or more—to work in tandem to ensure that the national economy had entered a downturn and that the majority of states were not yet in recovery from the downturn. These parameters were based on our quantitative analysis of prior recessions. As shown in figure 4, for the 1990-1991 downturn, 6 quarters of assistance would have been provided beginning with the third quarter of 1991 and ending after the fourth quarter of 1992.

Analysis of recent unemployment data indicate that such a strategy would already be triggered based on changes in unemployment for 2007 and 2008. In other words, current data confirm the economic pressures currently facing the states.

Considerations involved in such a strategy include: Timing assistance so that it is delivered as soon as it is needed, Targeting assistance according to the extent of each state’s downturn, Temporarily increasing federal funding so that it turns off when states’ economic circumstances sufficiently improve, and Triggering so the starting and ending points of assistance respond to indicators of states’ economic distress.

Any potential legislative response would need to be considered within the context of broader health care and fiscal challenges—including continually rising health care costs, a growing elderly population, and Medicare and Medicaid’s increasing share of the federal budget. Additional criteria could be established to accomplish other policy objectives, such as controlling federal spending by limiting the number of quarters of payments or stopping payments after predetermined spending caps are reached.

Conclusions

The federal government depends on states and localities to provide critical services including health care for low-income populations. States and localities depend on the federal government to help fund these services. As the largest share of federal grant funding and a large and growing share of state budgets, Medicaid is a critical component of this intergovernmental partnership. The long-term structural fiscal challenges facing the state and local sector further complicate the provision of Medicaid services. These challenges are exacerbated during periods of economic downturn when increased unemployment leads to increased eligibility for the Medicaid program. The current economic downturn presents additional challenges as states struggle to meet the needs of eligible residents in the midst of a credit crisis. Our work on the long-term fiscal outlook for state and local governments and strategies for providing Medicaid-related fiscal assistance is intended to offer the Committee a useful starting point for considering strategic evidence-based approaches to addressing these daunting intergovernmental fiscal issues.

GAO Contact and Staff Acknowledgments

For information about this statement for the record, please contact Stanley J. Czerwinski, Director, Strategic Issues, at (202) 512-6806 or czerwinskis@gao.gov. Contact points for our Offices of Congressional Relations and Public Affairs may be found on the last page of this statement. Individuals making key contributions to this testimony and related products include: Kathryn G. Allen, Director, Quality and Continuous Improvement; Thomas J. McCool, Director, Center for Economics; Amy Abramowitz, Meghana Acharya, Romonda McKinney Bumpus, Robert Dinkelmeyer, Greg Dybalski, Nancy Fasciano, Jerry Fastrup, Carol Henn, Richard Krashevski, Summer Lingard, James McTigue, Donna Miller, Elizabeth T. Morrison, Michelle Sager, Michael Springer, Jeremy Schwartz, Melissa Wolf, and Carolyn L. Yocom.

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