State Budgets and Medicaid

Posted on February 28, 2011 by townsend

• Governors differ on extent of flexibility for Medicaid, By Amy Goldstein and Dan Balz, February 28, 2011, Washington Post: “Democratic and Republican governors, burdened by crushing budget pressures from Medicaid, said Sunday that federal officials should allow them more freedom to change eligibility rules and other aspects of the public health insurance program for the poor. But they displayed sharp ideological differences over how far such flexibility should go. After a series of private conversations at the National Governors Association’s semiannual meeting over the weekend, leaders of the group formed a bipartisan committee to explore in detail what kind of flexibility over Medicaid the governors can agree to seek from federal health officials. It remains unclear whether they will be able to forge such common ground, given their partisan disagreements over both Medicaid and the new federal law to reshape the health-care system. ‘The closer governors get to Washington, the more they start acting like members of Congress,’ said Oregon Gov. John A. Kitzhaber (D), vice chairman of the NGA’s Health and Human Services Committee, referring to the rancorous debate over health care that persists on Capitol Hill.
• Governors: Medicaid more a budget buster than ever, By Julie Rovner, February 28, 2011, National Public Radio: “The federal government and the states have shared the cost of Medicaid, the health insurance program for some 60 million low-income Americans, since it was created in 1965. They’ve shared something else almost that long – arguments about who should foot how much of the ever-escalating bill. ‘Medicaid cost growth has been a problem for time immemorial,’ says Alan Weil, executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy. But this time, he says, things are different. For one thing, ‘the program is bigger, so growth on a larger base is more real dollars that’s harder to find…'”