Last week, Alaska became the 30th state to expand Medicaid with federal funding from the Affordable Care Act. “Alaska and Alaskans cannot wait any longer,” said Gov. Bill Walker. “We‘re not going to step away from this opportunity to help fellow Alaskans, period.”
After weeks of hemming and hawing on how they’re going to use reconciliation, Senate Republicans finally committed on Tuesday to using the budgetary tool to fully repeal Obamacare.
But it’s what Majority Leader Mitch McConnell did not say in a statement released in conjunction with Sen. Mike Lee that leaves room for things to get interesting: He did not say reconciliation would only be used for a repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
Across the country, governors and state lawmakers have circled “2017” on their calendars. This is the first year that the enhanced federal funding for Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion starts to fade away and states will have to scramble to find new funds to pick up their share of the expense. As it turns out, “free money” comes at a cost.
Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell said Tuesday that the Government Accountability Office has not told HHS how 11 fictitious applicants were able to maintain coverage as fictitious applicants on Healthcare.gov in an undercover investigation.
“We have asked the GAO in terms of ‘can we understand how you did this, they believe they are protecting their sources and methods,” Burwell said at a House Education and Workforce hearing Tuesday.
In King v. Burwell, Chief Justice John Roberts did the Obama administration a bigger favor than he realized. Writing for a himself and five colleagues, Roberts blessed the administration’s expansion of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, employer mandate, and premium subsidies in the 34 states that refused to establish exchanges — even though the majority, to say nothing of the three dissenters, recognized that expansion was in direct conflict with “the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase.”