Medicaid Expansion STILL in White House Plan
When bad ideas just won't fade away.
A massive Medicaid expansion — one of the key reasons state government across American objected to Congress’s health care takeover — is back from the dead and in President Obama’s revamped health care plan.
Obama’s proposal grows Medicaid eligibility to everybody with income up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level and requires states to pay 5 percent cost sharing in 2018, rising to 10 percent cost sharing in 2020.
Uh, hello? States can’t be bought off with a few more years of increased federal cost sharing for a wildly expanded program — our budgets are already breaking under the current eligibility levels. We know that in the long run, these costs are going to add up big time. Governors and many state legislators will have tenures far beyond 2020, and they’re not going to want costly Medicaid mandates to pile up as they stick around at the statehouse.
Parting note: this budget buster was filed under “other” on the table of contents at whitehouse.gov.