Faulting Mayor Bloomberg for a 47% increase in the city’s Medicaid costs during his tenure, mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner pledged yesterday to cut New York’s health-care expenses – by enrolling another 500,000 New Yorkers in Medicaid.

Mr. Weiner, a Democratic congressman whose district straddles Brooklyn and Queens, unveiled proposals he said would streamline the city’s administration of Medicaid benefits and increase the number of New Yorkers with access to health coverage. He introduced the plans in a policy speech delivered at Cardozo Law School.

One of the candidate’s suggestions was upgrading the technology the city uses in processing Medicaid applications. Mr. Weiner said the city spends $500 million annually in application processing alone, the result of an outdated, paper-based administrative system, and he promised to make the system completely computerized. He criticized the current administration for failing to take advantage of a 1999 contract with WebMD to bring the technology up to date.

Most of his proposals to curb the city’s growing health-care burden centered on increasing the number of New Yorkers with health coverage. When uninsured patients are treated in city hospitals, he said, the bills “are not being paid for by the health-care fairy” but are instead passed along to taxpayers.

One way of making sure more of those bills are paid for by insurance programs, the congressman said, is making it easier for small businesses to provide health coverage to employees. Mr. Weiner proposed that the city provide tax incentives to promote participation in public private partnerships like Brooklyn Health Works, a consortium that uses pooled purchasing power to provide health coverage at lower premiums.

Mr. Weiner seemed to rely most heavily on the government, however, to secure coverage for the 1.8 million city residents under 65 who he said are uninsured.

Because most Medicaid expenses are shouldered by the federal and state governments, it is in the city’s interest to maximize the number of eligible residents receiving Medicaid coverage, he said. As mayor, Mr. Weiner pledged, he would enroll more than 500,000 of the 800,000 Medicaid-eligible but uninsured New Yorkers, through various outreach programs.

A health-care expert at the Manhattan Institute, Robert Goldberg, said that while many of Mr. Weiner’s proposals were long overdue, it was unlikely he would realize significant savings for the city by increasing the number of New Yorkers receiving health coverage from the government.

“Some of these reforms are probably important in improving the quality of care,” Mr. Goldberg said, “but the idea that somehow putting more people into Medicaid is going to save money is not a realistic one. “If Mr. Weiner is interested in reducing the city’s health-care costs, Mr. Goldberg added, then pushing for private health-savings accounts and tax credits is a sounder way to go about it.

The chairman of the Health Committee in the State Assembly, Richard Gottfried, Democrat of Manhattan, likewise said it was unlikely the congressman’s proposals would yield significant savings for the city.

Mr. Gottfried praised Mr. Weiner’s initiatives but said the Legislature included in its budget last month a cap that limited the growth of local Medicaid spending to 3.5%. Of New Yorkers’ Medicaid expenses, he said, roughly 50% are paid for by the federal government, 33% by the state, and 17% by the city. It would “take a lot of effort” to cut Medicaid so significantly at the city level that it would provide savings beyond what the state Legislature had already secured for the city in last month’s budget, Mr. Gottfried said.

Moreover, the Bloomberg administration has already started each of the reforms outlined by Mr. Weiner, a spokesman for the mayor’s campaign, Stu Loeser, said. “Anthony Weiner’s knowledge of what the City of New York is already doing on health care is mind bogglingly shallow,” Mr. Loeser said.