Oklahoma GOP Does an About-Face on Medicaid Expansion

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Oklahoma GOP Does an About-Face on Medicaid Expansion

BY CORY HERRO MAY 16, 2016 1:56 PM

CREDIT:

Gov. Mary Fallin (R)

In a surprising about-face, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R) and the state’s GOP leaders areconsidering embracing a key tenet of Obamacare and expanding Medicaid to offer health insurance coverage to additional low-income Americans.

The state’s overwhelmingly Republican state lawmakers are considering the Oklahoma Health Care Authority’s proposal to move 175,000 people off Medicaid and into Obamacare’s subsidized private insurance markets, making room for new Medicaid enrollees. If state lawmakers and the Obama administration approve the plan, the federal government will cover 90 percent of the cost — reviving the state’s struggling Medicaid program with an influx of federal Obamacare dollars.

To fund the state’s 10 percent slice of the bill, the plan calls for a $1.50-per-pack tax on cigarettes.

If the state legislature doesn’t act, the state’s Medicaid agency says it will have no choice but to cut doctor reimbursements by 25 percent. Nico Gomez, CEO of the state Medicaid agency, warned state lawmakers that such cuts would be “cataclysmic” for the 1 in 5 low-income Oklahomans who are currently enrolled in Medicaid.

“I’m afraid many providers will close their doors to our patients,” he said during a meeting in the state capitol. “In some cases, especially in rural parts of our state, health care professionals will have to move their business to larger communities in order to survive financially.”

The cuts would put rural health care providers like McCurtain Memorial Hospital out of business. “A 25 percent cut [to Medicaid] would shutter our doors for good, leaving 33,000 people without access to health care,” CEO Jahni Tapley told the Houston Chronicle.

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Shuttering rural hospitals is a particular threat to women’s health. Nearly every pregnancy that McCurtain Memorial delivers is billed to Medicaid. When hospitals like that close, women may be forced to drive hundreds of miles to deliver, endangering their lives and their children’s lives in the process.

Gov. Fallin has marketed the plan to conservatives as a “Medicaid rebalancing,” hoping to sidestep the Obamacare-associated phrase “Medicaid expansion.” Her plan promises to bring federal dollars to Oklahoma without changing net Medicaid enrollment.

Conservative groups are resistant to expanding the Medicaid program, saying that this policy almost always goes over budget and leaves taxpayers to foot the bill. The right-wing group Americans for Prosperity -- backed by the anti-Obamacare Koch brothers -- are already mobilizing against Fallin's proposal.

Thanks to GOP lawmakers' unwillingness to enact this aspect of health care reform, more than 3 million poor uninsured adults in the country currently fall into a “coverage gap,” unable to access affordable insurance whatsoever — and 90 percent of that population lives in the South.

Over the past year, more GOP-controlled states have started coming around on this particular Obamacare policy. If Oklahoma lawmakers eventually agree to expand Medicaid, they will join Republican politicians in states like Tennessee, Arkansas, and Utah who have also sought to find a compromise in this area.

Oklahoma GOP Does an About-Face on Medicaid Expansion

welp

 

[Jhoon]

So republican doctors didn't want to take that quarter cut?

 

[hashmander]

and to think it wouldn't have cost them anything the past couple of years if they had expanded from day one. a free head start basically. so they've harmed people in their state for no reason other than stupid politics.

 

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Yet Another State Succumbs to Obamacare's Greatest Weapon: Math
KEVIN DRUMMAY 16, 2016 2:11 PM

Oklahoma has been resisting expansion of Medicaid for years, but they might finally be ready to cave in:

A bust in the oil patch has decimated state revenues, compounded by years of income tax cuts and growing corporate subsidies intended to make the state more business-friendly. Oklahoma's Medicaid agency has warned doctors and other

health care providers of cuts of up to 25 percent in what the state pays under Medicaid.

....In the poverty-wracked southeastern corner of the state, where 96 percent of babies in the McCurtain Memorial Hospital are born to Medicaid patients, most health care would end, said hospital CEO Jahni Tapley. "A 25 percent cut to Medicaid would not put my hospital in jeopardy, because we are already in jeopardy," Tapley said. "A 25 percent cut would shutter our doors for good, leaving 33,000 people without access to health care."

....Under the proposal, which would be funded in part with a $1.50-per-pack tax on cigarettes, Oklahoma would shift 175,000 people from its Medicaid rolls onto the federal health exchange created by the Affordable Care Act.

Oklahoma's governor is calling this "Medicaid rebalancing," but her constituents are too sharp for her. They know what's going on: "They can call it Medicaid rebalancing, but there's only one federal program that offers a 9-to-1 federal match, and that's Obamacare," said Johnathan Small, president of the Oklahoma Council on Public Affairs. There's just no fooling some people.

Anyway, it's good to see that they're not planning to fund this with, say, an increase in the income tax or the oil tax or the corporate tax. That might actually hit rich people, and God knows that would be the wrong way to pay for indigent services.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-dr...tate-succumbs-obamacares-greatest-weapon-math

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