By Chad Selweski
chad.selweski@macombdaily.com; @cbsnewsman
Wednesday, August 28,2013
As Republican conservatives and tea party activists rail
against state Senate approval for a Medicaid expansion, it appears that
one of the primary criticisms of the legislation was based on false
information.
Many Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate had
argued forcefully for months that the federal government may renege on
its promise to provide most or all of the expanded Medicaid funding for
health care coverage. Critics in the state Capitol said that Washington
could pull the plug, leaving Michigan with huge financial burdens to fund the broader version of Medicaid planned under the White House’s Obamacare plan.
But
a key health care reform expert, plus Snyder administration officials,
say that Michigan can immediately bow out of the Medicaid plan if
lawmakers believe the federal government is not living up to its
promises.
“States can opt in or opt out
of the expansion at any time,” said Jennifer Tolbert, a policy analyst
for the nonprofit, nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation research
organization.
In fact, U.S. Health and Human Services guidelines
have specified that no state is locked into a Medicaid expansion for the
“working poor,” no matter the political or fiscal circumstances in the
future.
The Snyder administration asserts that is has been trying
to shoot down claims by lawmakers about signing on to an expensive
health care plan that could drop some or all of the costs into the lap
of Michigan legislators — and ultimately the taxpayers.
“That is
one of the myths we have been trying to combat,” said Angela Minicuci,
spokeswoman for the state Department of Community Health. “There are a
number of misconceptions about this legislation.”
As the 20-18
Senate vote on Tuesday in favor of the Medicaid expansion appears to
have eliminated the last political hurdle, some legislators may want to
do some Monday morning quarterbacking to determine if the bitter fight
over the legislation was based on a false premise. The idea that this
was a landmark vote with far-reaching implications may have been off the
mark.
The Obama administration is offering 100 percent funding
for expanding the state’s Medicaid coverage to families at 133 percent
or less of the federal poverty level
— or $26,900 annual income for a family of three. That promise will
gradually slide to a 90 percent commitment in 2020 and is expected to
remain at that level for the foreseeable future.
Tolbert, a key
expert at Kaiser, one of a small group of research groups that has been
labeled an objective source of information on Obamacare, said that the
only penalty paid by the Michigan Legislature if it pulled out a year
from now would be a political one — offering and then rescinding
low-cost health care coverage for 470,000 poor Michigan residents.
The
same false argument that the federal government would lock in Medicaid
expansions was used in a number of Republican-dominated states,
according to Tolbert. She said some of the claims were unintentionally
misleading, while other cases “it was willful to put forward a political
argument.”
As the Michigan House prepares to grant final approval
to the Medicaid plan as early as Tuesday, embracing the Senate’s
revised version of a House bill passed in June, one major issue remains.
Democratic
advocates of the new Medicaid system want to encourage the House and
Senate to muster two-thirds supermajorities to give the bill immediate
effect. If that fails, the new system would not kick in until 90 days
after the start of the new year in 2014.
