HELENA — There are 91,563 Montanans participating in the Medicaid expansion HELP act as of Jan. 15, generating nearly $40 million in savings in Medicaid benefits, a state panel was told Thursday.
Members of the Legislature’s Children, Families, Health and Human Services Interim Committee reviewed a report on Medicaid expansion. The committee took no immediate action after hearing the report.
As noted earlier, I've been a bit lax with posting for a few days as I've worked on my latest 2-part video explainer about risk pools and #ShortAssPlans.
However, there's been a lot going on, so I figured I should try and at least do a quick update on a few items. First up: Medicaid expansion!
Here in my home state of Michigan, I've written several posts about how the GOP-controlled state legislature trying to shove through a draconian "work requirement" bill for Healthy Michigan, our name for ACA Medicaid expansion program which has been working just fine, thank you very much, for nearly 5 years now. The bill easily passed the state Senate (where the GOP holds a supermajority), and is now under consideration by the state House (where they have a smaller but still solid majority at the moment). The good news is that GOP Governor Rick Snyder--who championed passage of Healthy Michigan in the first place and seems to think it's fine mostly the way it is--is likely to veto the senate version of the bill. The bad news is that it might simply be tweaked somewhat by the House.
Price says that he's not a big fan of the GOP tax bill's 2019 individual mandate repeal-- says it will harm the pool in the exchange markets & drive up costs
Making my eyeballs roll even further back in my head, here's what Price said just nine months ago (shortly before he was given the boot from the HHS Dept.):
...I'm working on my latest crudely-produced-but-hopefully-informative explainer video!
It's actually a two-parter. The first part gives an overview of how Risk Pools actually work and why quarantining sick people into a separate High Risk Pool is such a terrible idea. The second part goes into why Donald Trump's recent Short-Term/Association Plan executive order will make a problem which already existed in 2017, made worse by design in 2018, even worse starting in 2019.
Here's a sneak peak. I hope to have Part One uploaded this week and Part Two either towards the end of the week or early next week.
Time and opportunity still exist to replace Obamacare.
...I reported in January that a number of conservative groups, under the leadership of former Sen. Rick Santorum, was working hard to craft a new Obamacare replacement...Behind the scenes, those groups...have continued to meet and tweak their plan, and they seem just a few weeks away from being able to unveil it.
...I listened in on a March 21 conference call among numerous interested parties, and received further updates within the past week from Santorum.
Back in January, I noted that Wisconsin GOP Governor Scott Walker, who has followed the party line on the ACA since it was first signed into law, has suddenly found religion:
After years of fighting Obamacare, Gov. Scott Walker is now seeking to stabilize the state marketplace under the law.
Wisconsin plans to permission to cover expensive medical claims for health insurers on the marketplace, which should lower premium increases and could bring back companies that dropped out, the governor said in an interview with reporters on Friday ahead of his election-year State of the State address Wednesday.
The state will also ask to permanently continue SeniorCare, a prescription drug program Walker has previously sought to pare down, he said.
Walker also said he’ll ask the state Senate to pass a bill authored by Democratic lawmakers and passed by the Assembly that would enshrine into state law access to private insurance for people with pre-existing conditions.
In the most significant of his health care proposals, Walker will ask the Legislature to join a few other states in adopting a reinsurance programto prop up the individual market, which is used by some 216,000 residents, in a state innovation waiver allowed under the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.
Last month I urged Democrats to go strongly on offense re. campaigning on healthcare policy in 2018 given the general landscape but especially the exit polling out of the special Congressional election in Pennsylvania:
Health care was a top issue to voters. Health care was ranked as a top issue for 52% of voters (15% saying it was the most important issue and another 37% saying it was very important). Only 19% said it was not that important or not important at all.
Conor Lamb won big especially among voters for whom health care was a top priority. Among voters who said health care was the most important issue for them, Lamb beat Rick Saccone 64-36 and among the broader group of voters who said it was either the most important or a very important issue Lamb beat Saccone 62-38.
On health care, voters said Lamb better reflected their views by 7 points (45% to 38%) over Saccone. With independents, that gap widened to 16 points with 50% saying Lamb’s health care views were more in line with theirs to only 34% for Saccone.
A week or so I noted that activists in Utah had managed to secure enough ballot petition signatures to get full, no-strings-attached ACA Medicaid expansion placed on the ballot this November...superseding legislation signed by the Governor which would otherwise only expand it to fewer than half as many people, while also imposing a work requirement on enrollees:
If approved, the initiative would require the state to expand Medicaid to people making up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, and would prohibit enrollment caps.
Under ObamaCare, the federal government would cover 90 percent of the costs of expansion. The state share would be funded through a 0.15 percent increase in the sales tax.
...The ballot initiative would cover more than 150,000 people.
Enrollment in the federally facilitated marketplace has dropped 9 percent over the past two years, with a nearly 40 percent drop in new enrollment, while enrollment in state-based marketplaces remained steady during the same period.
Nothing new under the sun here; this is the core of what I do at ACASignups.net. In fact, this press release underplays the point slightly: The official enrollment tallies are down 10% on the federal exchange since 2016 and up 1.5%, although the discrepancy might be partly due to Kentucky shifting from state-based status to federal status in 2017.
I know I tend to pitch for folks to support my work here at ACA Signups fairly frequently, but today I want to pass the hat a bit for my friend Chris Savage of Eclectablog (and yes, there's even a healthcare angle here). From his post earlier today:
You may recall that earlier this year, I had a run-in with a bad dude named Diverticulitis that put me in the hospital for ten days. As it turns out, I need to have surgery next month to keep that scary situation from ever happening again. Because this is happening during the time when we normally hold our annual fundraising party, we are going to postpone the party until late August when I am back on my feet.
The upshot is that the Eclectablog bank account is nearly depleted and won’t be significantly refreshed until almost September. Therefore, this quarterly fundraiser is more important than most. We need to raise enough money to keep paying our fabulous contributors until the annual party.
