Pennsylvania would face a $3 billion hole in current Medicaid funding to poor, disabled and senior residents if the proposed health care reform by Republican Congress goes into effect, the state’s human services secretary said Wednesday.
The projected decrease in funding would be a result of the Republicans’ current plans to undo the expansion of Medicaid that has occurred through the Affordable Care Act and implement a new funding formula for traditional recipients like the disabled and seniors, Human Services Secretary Ted Dallas said.
“That is something we simply couldn’t afford,” he said. “We would have to decide who we could cover and who we couldn’t and those are not decisions we want to make.”
Dallas, along with state Health Secretary Dr. Karen Murphy, Aging Secretary Teresa Osborne and Insurance Commissioner Teresa Miller held a conference call to address the growing chorus of concerns from a broad spectrum of interests, including the medical and educational fields, about large-scale cuts to Medicaid.
The U.S. House of Representatives are scheduled to vote Thursday on the Republicans’ proposed American Health Care Act, but the legislation’s fate is still very much up in the air. No House Democrats are expected to vote for it, which means just 22 Republican “no” votes would doom it before the bill is given to the Senate for consideration.
Some moderate Republicans, including U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Bucks County, have already said they could not support the plan in its current form. Fitzpatrick wrote in a long Facebook post March 18 that "after considering the current healthcare bill in a thorough and deliberate manner," he would not support it.
The $3 billion chasm would be created by a decrease in the federal government’s portion of Medicaid funding for Pennsylvanians: $2.2 billion lost to the ACA’s expansion coverage and another $860 to $1 billion by the change from reimbursement-based to annual lump sum-based, which Republicans describe as “per capita caps” in their proposed American Health Care Act.
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NBC10 reported last week that Sen. Bob Casey believes the AHCA would “decimate” Medicaid funding for thousands of Pennsylvanians.
“I think a lot of people don’t know how dependent and how important Medicaid is to people’s lives, even a lot of people who voted for the president by the way,” he told NBC10 in an interview.
Meanwhile, parents of children with special needs as well as caregivers at hospitals like Children's Hospital of Philadelphia are mobilizing against the AHCA’s proposed slashes to Medicaid.
Seniors and the disabled in Pennsylvania make up one-third of the state’s Medicaid population, Dallas said, but they account for two-thirds of the funding.
In addition to those vulnerable populations, he said, the ACA’s expansion has dropped the uninsured rate to 6.4 percent in Pennsylvania. By expanding Medicaid coverage to people making up to 134 percent of the federal poverty rate, an additional 716,000 Pennsylvanians have gained health coverage, Dallas said.
“If the AHCA is passed, a lot of those things could change and become memories,” he said.
