The Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, August 2015. AP/Andrew Harnik
Washington, D.C. —(ENEWSPF)–May 26, 2017. As the Senate considers vast cuts to the Medicaid program under the House passed American Health Care Act (AHCA), a new column from the Center for American Progress assesses how states would have been affected by caps using four different growth rate scenarios.
“The per capita cap stacks the deck against states and against individuals with greater health needs. Regardless of the growth rate, per capita caps would end Medicaid as we know it by replacing the traditional federal funding share with capped amounts,” said Emily Gee, health economist at CAP. “Every cap modification that Senate Republicans are considering would leave states vulnerable to serious funding shortages for their Medicaid programs.”
CAP provides estimates of federal funding cuts to states under four different scenarios using historical Medicaid data:
- Caps like those in the House-passed AHCA
- More generous caps, set to rise at a rate faster than medical inflation in all years
- Stricter caps that grow with overall inflation instead of with faster-rising medical inflation
- Caps pegged to historical rates of Medicaid per-enrollee spending
Under every cap the report assessed, federal funding in 2011 would have been cut significantly for Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Louisiana, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia, among other states, if caps had been set in 2001. Even under the most generous growth formula, the average cut in federal funding per enrollee in 2011 would have been $497 in Alaska, $1,248 in Arizona, $649 in Arkansas, $549 in Louisiana, $201 in Ohio, $78 in Tennessee, and $309 in West Virginia.
As outlined in its recent budget, the Trump administration intends to bring down Medicaid per capita caps even lower than those set by the AHCA, further deepening the AHCA’s extreme cuts to Medicaid.
Click here to read “The State Effects of the Medicaid Cuts Being Discussed” by Emily Gee.
Source: http://americanprogress.org