A House committee voted Tuesday to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, something Republicans are seeking as a precondition to expanding the health-care program to more low-income, uninsured Virginians. It was not clear how many of the state’s 1 million Medicaid recipients would be affected if the bill becomes law because the majority are children, the elderly, pregnant women and people with disabilities, all of whom would be exempt under the plan because they are considered to face some barrier to work.
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Across plans and states, the expansion population experienced high disenrollment rates, indicating that, as in other Medicaid eligibility groups, there is substantial churn in this population.
• Even after adjusting for age and gender, claims costs increased steadily over time, suggesting that expansion enrollees have complex and/or chronic conditions.
— For some enrollment cohorts, average claims costs decreased modestly in the second half of the first year of enrollment, suggesting some initial pent-up demand for services, though claims costs increased steadily from that point forward.
• Across enrollment groups, per member per month spending on prescription drugs increased with enrollment duration.
— Among enrollees who remained enrolled the longest, inpatient claims initially made up the largest share of claims costs, but were surpassed by prescription drug claims by month 8 of enrollment, on average.
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Americans are familiar with the horrors of the opioid crisis, and government at every level has tried to respond with spending on treatment programs and more. But one area that deserves more scrutiny is how government programs may be contributing to the epidemic.
Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson released a report this month from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that connects the dots between Medicaid and the opioid epidemic. The report doesn’t claim too much, conceding that everything from too many prescriptions to drug marketing contributed to the epidemic.
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Legislation to expand Medicaid in Virginia failed Thursday after a state Senate panel voted on party lines to defeat the measure.
The state’s Education and Health Committee voted down the bill 8-7. The bill can be brought up at another time, but if the committee doesn’t take further action, the bill is dead.
The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Emmett Hanger (R), would have directed the state’s secretary of Health and Human Resources to submit a Medicaid expansion waiver to the federal government.
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Thousands of Medicaid recipients in Mississippi would be required to work to be eligible for the program if the Trump administration approves a controversial state waiver request that recently opened for public comment.
The proposal is likely to set off a firestorm of criticism from Democrats and health advocates, who argue that work requirements, combined with Mississippi’s strict Medicaid eligibility requirements, will result in thousands of people losing their coverage.
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Oregon approved taxes on hospitals, health insurers and managed care companies in an unusual special election Tuesday that asked voters — and not lawmakers — how to pay for Medicaid costs that now include coverage of hundreds of thousands of low-income residents added to the program’s rolls under the Affordable Care Act.
Measure 101 was passing handily in early returns Tuesday night. The single-issue election drew national attention to this progressive state, which aggressively expanded its Medicaid rolls under President Barack Obama’s health care reforms. Oregon now has one of the lowest rates of uninsured residents in the nation at 5 percent. About 1 million Oregonians — 25 percent — now receive health care coverage from Medicaid.
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Oregon aggressively expanded its Medicaid rolls under the Affordable Care Act, adding enough people to leave only 5 percent of its population uninsured — one of America’s lowest rates.
Now, with the reduction of a federal match that covered those enrollees, the state is calling on voters to decide how to pay for its ballooning Medicaid costs.
A special election on Tuesday asks Oregonians whether they approve of a tax on hospitals, health insurers and managed care companies that would leave Medicaid, as it is now, untouched. More than 1 in 4 residents here rely on it.
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“The Trump administration’s action today is cruel,” said Democratic Congressman Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey. The new policy is “the latest salvo of the Trump administration’s war on health care,” according to a health-care advocacy group. “The pain is the point” of the policy, wrote columnist and economist Paul Krugman.
They were attacking the Trump administration’s decision last week to allow states to impose work requirements on Medicaid beneficiaries. But far from being a “cruel” action designed to inflict “pain” on the vulnerable, the administration’s decision is completely reasonable.
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A battle is brewing in the courts over the Trump administration’s move to let states impose work requirements for recipients of Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor. Advocacy groups are gearing up to sue the administration, arguing that it doesn’t have the power to allow work requirements and other rules for Medicaid without action from Congress.
But the administration is defending the legality of the shift. When unveiling guidance Thursday on the work requirements, top Medicaid official Seema Verma said the administration has “broad authority” under current law to allow states to make changes through waivers.
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A day after the Trump administration announced that it would allow states to compel poor people on Medicaid to work or get ready for jobs, federal health officials on Friday granted Kentucky permission to impose those requirements.
Becoming the first-in-the-nation state to move forward with the profound change to the safety-net health insurance program is a victory for Kentucky’s Republican governor, Matt Bevin, who during his 2015 campaign for office vowed to reverse the strong embrace of the Affordable Care Act by his Democratic predecessor.
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