How Much Does Your State Spend on Medicaid Visits?

From State House Call blog South Carolina has launched a new website called the Medicaid Provider Transparency Tool. You can get some of the background in a story from GreenvilleOnline. Here's something remarkable (though not at all unusual if you're familiar with Medicaid): Half of all births in the state are paid for by Medicaid. Looking through the early comments on the story, I'm reminded again that it's easy to pay attention to the simple, hot button issues ("Hey, how much are we spending on illegal immigrants?") and ignore less obvious but more significant sources of the problem, such as an overregulated insurance market, a poor public education system that doesn't equip people for jobs that pay more (or any jobs, for that matter), personal habits and cultural artifacts that contribute to poverty (and hence, Medicaid eligibility), and so forth.