Report: Medicaid Expansion Denial Will Cost States Billions [View all]

[Tx4obama]

Medicaid Expansion Denial Will Cost States Billions: Report

States that refuse to expand Medicaid under President Barack Obama's health care reform law not only will deny health coverage to poor residents and lose access to a huge influx of federal dollars, they also will see increased spending on uninsured people's unpaid medical bills, according to a new report by the Rand Corp., a consulting firm.

The Rand Corp. analyzed 14 states with governors who oppose the Medicaid expansion. It found their actions will deprive 3.6 million people of health coverage under Obamacare, forgo $8.4 billion in federal funding, and cost them $1 billion for programs that partially compensate medical providers who care for the indigent, according to the report published in the journal "Health Affairs." Since nearly half of states may not undertake the Medicaid expansion next year, those figures could be even higher. Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia plan to broaden Medicaid in 2014, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Obama and congressional Democrats intended the health care reform law to target financial assistance to those with the lowest incomes by offering Medicaid coverage to people who earn just over the federal poverty level and tax credits to other low- and middle-income people to subsidize the purchase of private health insurance. When the Supreme Court upheld the law last year, it also ruled that states could opt out of the Medicaid expansion, which will dull the impact of Obamacare on the poorest uninsured.

"State policymakers should be aware that if they do not expand Medicaid, fewer people will have health insurance, and state and local governments will have to bear higher costs for uncompensated care," Carter Price and Christine Eibner of the Rand Corp. write. "We estimated states' costs for expansion to be less than the reduction in their costs for uncompensated care."

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Full article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/03/medicaid-expansion_n_3367301.html