If anyone can claim the title of “most surprised” by Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling — in which the justices upheld the health reform law — it might be Matt Salo.
He directs the National Association of Medicaid Directors in Washington. Salo had no inkling that the court would make the law’s expansion of Medicaid to 17 million Americans an option, rather than a requirement.
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“We did not see that coming,” Salo said. “I did manage to put together a short little statement, but this is not an option we had prepared for at all.”
Salo works with all 50 states — some support the law, and others ardently oppose it. From where he sits, he sees governors and Medicaid directors facing a very big choice.
“States are going to weigh leaving huge amounts of federal dollars on the table versus accepting potential exposure from expanding an entitlement program,” Salo said. “You used to just have to hold your nose because you had to do it. Now, every state is going to have to make some aggressive calculations.”
Those calculations boil down to two incentives, pulling in opposite directions. On the one hand, there’s a deep pot of federal money for states to expand their Medicaid programs. On the other, there’s the fear of getting even more saddled with bills from an increasingly expensive entitlement program.
Let’s unpack that a bit.
There’s one really big incentive to expand Medicaid: a huge sum of federal money. The federal government will pay the complete cost for the Medicaid expansion for three years, 100 percent of the bill for enrolling the newly eligible. That’s a great deal for states, because the federal match for Medicaid is traditionally much lower. It varies by state — those with low-income residents get a higher match than those with high earners — but, on average, the federal government currently pays 57 percent of the bill.
The Urban Institute’s John Holahan ran the numbers for the Kaiser Family Foundation and found that the federal government will spend $443.5 billion on this provision from 2014 to 2019.
“Spending in 2014 is expected to be relatively small, particularly for states, because enrollment is being phased-in and the federal matching rate for new eligibles is 100 percent,” Holahan said.
When you think about it that way, the Medicaid expansion sounds like a real win: States get loads of free money to pay residents’ health-care bills. It would be a big help to local hospitals and doctors, who often get stuck with uninsured patients’ bills. And it is likely to drive down the cost of health care for everyone; studies have found higher rates of uninsurance to be associated with higher costs for everyone else.
That’s the good side. Now, the negatives: States could incur significant costs from the expansion. The federal government won’t cover all bills for Medicaid enrollees who were already eligible for the program but never signed up. States worry about those people showing up to enroll, because of all the publicity around the health-care expansion, and having to accept them at the regular match rate.
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