Medicaid Expansion gets entrenched in Arkansas -- even with a conservative GOP government

The latest news out of Arkansas offers more evidence that the Medicaid expansion will durable even in the most conservative states once it gets entrenched.  

I argued this point tentatively in March when new Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson and large GOP majorities in the state legislature reauthorized the expansion, which had been put in place under Democrat Mike Beebe’s administration, for the current fiscal year while putting together a task force to examine long-term tweaks in the system.

Arkansas has an unusual expansion: instead of simply enrolling everyone eligible in traditional Medicaid, the expansion provides subsidies to fully pay for private health insurance sold on the exchanges. As Richard Mayhew notes, commercial policies have higher costs than Medicaid, so the plan is a more expensive piece of “performance art,” albeit one that still accomplishes the primary goal of getting people covered.

The Arkansas Times picks up the story from there. As the federal match starts dropping in 2017 (and Arkansas enters new negotiations for a waiver with the Feds), the state found its was going to be on the hook for an extra $50-60 million, and Hutchinson implored the task force to cut costs.

Last week he met with the Task Force and made a speech with three major parts.

First, he engaged in the usual right-wing Kabuki ritual of complaining about how horrible Obamacare was and that it was taking away health insurance and….

(insert Charlie Brown trombone sounds here).

Oh, sorry, nodded off there. 

Second, he offered several of the usual conservative pet rocks to cut costs: notably requiring  more premium cost sharing for people above the poverty line (Iowa does this and the Feds would likely approve it in a waiver), requiring some sort of job search requirement for people on Medicaid that wouldn’t require a new waiver (this Feds won’t tolerate much here, and most of the people on expanded Medicaid work anyway) and making sure that working people with access to health insurance take that rather than enrolling in Medicaid (this will affect almost no one).

Finally, after emphasizing his anti-Obama bona-fides, he got to the real point: The Medicaid expansion had covered more than 220,000 of “our friends, our neighbors and our families,” and that rejecting it would cut them off of health care and drain more than $1.4 billion from the state economy. He also made the biggest policy proposal, which would be to shift everyone below the poverty line from private plans to the cheaper (and just as comprehensive) traditional Medicaid.

So the big conservative plan to tweak the “private option” Medicaid expansion in Arkansas and be fiscally responsible is to …. move more people into traditional Medicaid, just like Obamacare originally envisioned. I swear HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell and President Obama just exchanged knowing glances and an extremely restrained fist bump in the Oval Office.

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