How GOP Budget Plan Would Cut States Medicaid Funding

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Study Details How GOP Budget Plan Would Cut States' Medicaid Funding

By Phil Galewitz KHN Staff Writer May 10, 2011

Eight states – including Florida, Colorado and Georgia – would lose more than 40

percent of their federal funding for Medicaid over the next decade under the

House Republicans' plan to repeal the 2010 federal health law and convert

Medicaid into a block grant program, according to an analysis of the plan's

effects on states released today.

The study found that under the plan authored by House Budget Chairman ,

R-Wis., states would lose an average of 34 percent of their federal funding for

Medicaid. The drop in funding would range from 26 percent in Washington, Vermont

and Minnesota to 44 percent in Florida and Wyoming.

The study was released by the Kaiser Family Foundation's Commission on Medicaid

and the Uninsured and conducted by researchers at the Urban Institute. (KHN is

an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

The health overhaul passed last year increases eligibility in 2014 for Medicaid

to anyone with earnings under 133 percent of the federal poverty level, or

$14,484 for an individual, with the federal government picking up at least 90

percent of the Medicaid expansion in the first decade, including 100 percent of

the expansion the first few years.

The GOP's 2012 budget, which passed the House last month in a vote along

partisan lines, would save the federal government $1.4 trillion in Medicaid

spending over 10 years, including $610 billion from the repeal of the health law

and $750 billion from the move to make Medicaid a block grant program. That

would be a 34 percent reduction over planned Medicaid spending under current law

– including the health overhaul – and 22 percent less than under the existing

program, according to the Kaiser study...

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2011/May/10/kaiser-study-on-state-medica\

id.aspx