Medicaid’s Western Push Hits Montana

Medicaid’s Western Push Hits MontanaAfter sitting out the first full year of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, lawmakers in Montana have moved on to arguing -- not about whether -- but about how much federal cash to pull down.WebMD News from Kaiser Health News

By Eric Whitney, Montana Public Radio Tue, Jan 06 2015

The Affordable Care Act is on the move in Western states, with the governors of Utah, Wyoming and Montana all working to hammer out deals with the Obama administration to expand Medicaid in ways tailored to each state.

But getting the federal stamp of approval is just the first hurdle — the governors also have to sell it to their legislatures who have their own ideas of how expansion should go.

The latest case-in-point is Montana, where the governor and the legislature have competing proposals about how much federal Medicaid expansion cash the state should try to pull down.

Montana’s GOP-dominated legislature, which meets every other year, rejected Democratic Governor Steve Bullock’s attempts in 2013 to expand Medicaid and set up a state-based insurance exchange. This year Bullock has a different Medicaid expansion proposal aiming to reduce the Treasure State’s 17 percent uninsured rate. It would use federal dollars to contract with a third party administrator to process claims and run a provider network. So far Republican leaders are not embracing it any more than they did his 2013 plan.

Nine Republican state lawmakers last week released an alternative proposal, the “Healthy Montana Family Plan.”  It rejects the approach by Bullock and the White House that Medicaid should be offered to anyone making less than 138 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL), or $16,105 a year. That would be about 70,000 people in this sparsely populated state with just over 1 million residents.

Instead, the plan would extend Medicaid only to certain categories of people who make less than 100 percent of the federal poverty line, or $11,670. The idea is to “keep it targeted toward what it’s intended to do,” said plan co-author Sen. Fred Thomas, “take care of our most vulnerable citizens … disabled persons, low income seniors, low income parents, children.”

“Able-bodied people should be able to go out and get a job,” incoming Republican House Speaker Austin Knudsen told the Billings Gazette.

Thomas, an insurance agent by trade, says that extending Medicaid to non-disabled adults who don’t have children is “a disincentive to work.”

// Pulling Third Party Info from XMLfunction getPubType() { return "third_party" } var pubSource = 'Kaiser Health News';// init check partners pluginrequirejs(['article/1/checkpartners'],function(){});// init webmdArticle pluginrequirejs(['article/1/article'],function(){$('#dyn-art').webmdArticle({pageData: {title: "Medicaid’s Western Push Hits Montana", imgPath: "", caption: "", description: "After sitting out the first full year of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, lawmakers in Montana have moved on to arguing -- not about whether -- but about how much federal cash to pull down.", type: "article"}, shareTypes:{email: {htmlTemplate: 'Email'}}, shareText: '', expandIcons: {html: {more: 'More', less: 'Less'}, position: 3}});});

Web-based services, retail clinics and more.

Are you making any of these common errors?

View the original article here