The Alabama Policy Institute (API) is continuing the fight against expanding Medicaid in the Yellowhammer State.

API Director Stephanie Smith said Alabama should focus on making the private healthcare system better for people in the state instead of incentivizing more government dependency.

Smith recently discussed the issue on WVNN’s “The Yaffee Program.”

“I think that there are a lot of warts in the system,” she said, “but I would rather have a warty private system than a system that is just created by the federal government and we’re all subservient to it.”

One of the main reason some Democrats have pushed for expanding Medicaid in the past is because of the “coverage gap,” which includes those who can’t afford private insurance but also make too much money to currently qualify for Medicaid.

Smith said expanding Medicaid is not the proper solution to the coverage gap because it results in more people dropping out of the workforce.

“There is a coverage gap,” she admitted. “We should be encouraging those who are working and encourage work, and if we expand Medicaid that discourages work because the income thresholds are such that if you’re holding a full time job it’s difficult to get those entitlements. And so when you expand it, that means the motivation is you not work because you have this extra money in your pocket from your coverage without doing anything to get that.”

Smith also discussed some of the possible reforms to the private system.

“One of the major things that we’ve been working on for several years is the Certificate of Needs process,” she said. “That is directly related to this situation. When you have government telling medical providers, or corporations that are trying to create medical providers, that they have to go through the government, it’s a long process, a lot of times it’s a corrupted process, an extensive process, even just to establish their business. It oppresses their business.

“So when we’re talking about rural healthcare, when we’re talking about Medicaid expansion, what we really need to do is increase freedom. And we can increase freedom by cutting the Certificate of Needs process.”

Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays 9-11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee