The following article by Amy Goldstein of the Washington Post was posted on the StarTribune website March 15, 2017:
Hours after she was sworn in, the Trump administration’s top official for Medicaid and her boss dispatched a letter to the nation’s governors, urging states to alter the insurance program for poor and disabled people by charging them insurance premiums, requiring them to pay part of emergency room bills and prodding them to get jobs.
The letter, sent Tuesday night by Seema Verma, the new administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, also derides the Medicaid expansion that 31 states and the District of Columbia adopted under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
The expansion, which has extended Medicaid to 11 million people with incomes of up to about $16,000 for a single person or nearly $34,000 for a family of four, “was a clear departure from the core, historical mission of the program,” the letter said.
By giving states greater help with these new beneficiaries, it contends the ACA has “provided states with an incentive to deprioritize the most vulnerable populations.” The three-page letter does not mention that, for the first three years, the federal government paid the entire cost of covering the expansion group and still pays nearly all of that.
The message from Verma and Price signals an initial step toward redesigning the program along lines that conservatives have long favored and that the new Medicaid administrator brought to Indiana as a consultant and the chief architect of broad changes that state first adopted nearly a decade ago. Overall, their letter encourages states to innovate and attain more freedom from federal standards by seeking “waivers” from government rules on the program, which covers 68 million low-income people, including children, pregnant women, and those who are elderly or disabled, as well as adults who merely are poor.
Both officials have in the past railed against a system that requires states to get federal permission to “modernize” their Medicaid programs, but the letter makes no mention of eliminating that requirement.
This impetus for states to rethink their approach to insuring their poor and vulnerable residents comes as House Republicans are debating plans that would rewrite the program in fundamental ways, ending the federal government’s open-ended responsibility in paying for beneficiaries’ costs while abolishing the ACA’s expansion over the next several years.
A particular concern among critics of such conservative directions is the possibility that Medicaid might require people to be employed or training for jobs to qualify for benefits — as the nation’s main welfare program has done for the past two decades. In approving a variety of Medicaid experiments under the ACA, the Obama administration consistently rejected requests from any state that wanted to compel its Medicaid beneficiaries to hold a job.
The letter stops short of urging an outright work requirement, saying that CMS will “review and approve meritorious innovations that build on the human dignity that comes with training, employment and independence.”
Asked late Tuesday whether the Trump administration would allow states to impose work requirements within Medicaid, an HHS spokesman replied, “We can’t speculate.”
Verma was sworn in on Tuesday, a day after the Senate confirmed her nomination by a vote of 55 to 43 along party lines. The vote reflected the deep divisions on Capitol Hill over the Trump administration’s plans for the nation’s health care system. At her confirmation hearing earlier this month, Verma sidestepped the question of whether she would favor a nationwide extension of the unusual Medicaid provisions she helped Indiana’s program secure.
Indiana requires everyone who receives benefits to pay monthly premiums, and their contributions are invested in health savings accounts. Very poor people who do not make the payments are bumped down to a lower tier of coverage, while people with slightly more income are removed from the program.
CMS is a powerhouse within the Department of Health and Human Services, overseeing about $1 trillion in spending on the two vast entitlement programs. For the past seven years, the agency also has carried out most of the implementation of the ACA, which Trump and others in the GOP are working to demolish and replace with more conservative health policies.
View the post here.