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Dayton
Daily News
Medicaid
expansion in Ohio would avoid a $404M
budget gap
By Jackie Borchardt
COLUMBUS
— State officials told lawmakers
Thursday that rejecting Gov. John Kasich’s proposal to expand Medicaid
to
Ohio’s working poor would cause a $400 million hole in the state budget
that
would need to be patched with money dedicated for schools, law
enforcement and
local governments.
Greg
Moody, director of the Governor’s Office
of Health Transformation, said extending Medicaid will actually save
Ohio
taxpayers $404 million over two years for several reasons such as
decreasing
state payments for hospital capital costs, passing prisoner health
costs to
Medicaid and generating greater sales tax revenue from increased sales
of
managed care plans that run Medicaid.
“It
is the governor’s primary concern — it is
what for six months we have struggled with — to balance the obvious
advantages
of covering more Ohioans with a real sense of responsibility of
stewardship to
taxpayers,” Moody told the House Finance and Appropriations Committee.
“It’s
been national groups saying how this is the wrong decision for Ohio
without
understanding how Ohio works.”
Kasich
is one of six Republican governors to
recommend expanding taxpayer-funded healthcare to those earning below
138
percent of federal poverty levels, an action expected to add 275,000
Ohioans to
the state’s Medicaid rolls.
Friday
is the deadline for states to declare
whether they will set up their own health insurance exchanges under the
Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act. Ohio officials on Thursday sent a
letter to
the Obama administration confirming what Kasich said in November. Ohio
will
keep its authority to regulate health plans in and out of the exchange,
but
leave running it to the federal government...
Read
the rest of the article at Dayton Daily
News
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