Medicaid, Meet Indiana

By JONATHAN HALVORSON We will soon have a Vice President and a head of CMS who hail from the great state of Indiana, and are proud of what they’ve done with Medicaid there through the Healthy Indiana Plan. Seema Verma, the proposed CMS Administrator, is credited with being the architect of Healthy Indiana, and Mike Pence, the Vice President-elect, presents Healthy Indiana as one of the signature achievements of his term as governor of that state. It is too early to tell if the program will be enough to raise Indiana up the ranks on health and healthcare from the bottom quintile (1, 2). However, since Republicans have run the table with Congress, the White House and soon the Supreme Court, we can reasonably conclude that the future of Medicaid in America is going to look more like Indiana. That doesn’t mean that income-based Medicaid eligibility will dramatically change. Pence was one of the few Republican governors who took advantage of the opportunity to expand Medicaid eligibility up to 138% of poverty, and President-elect Trump has promised, in his emphatic way, that people will not be denied healthcare coverage in his administration. Some Republicans in Congress have different ideas, however, and the outcome is not at all clear yet. While eligibility levels and the overall level of federal support for program costs get worked out over the next few months, there appears to be more clarity on coming changes to the financial responsibilities between Medicaid and the p...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs