Trump Administration Launches Illegal Project To Destroy Medicaid In Red States
February 3rd 2020
Save Medicaid Action (Jobs with Justice)
By Joan McCarter
Congress has long rejected the favorite project of conservatives to destroy Medicaid by turning it into block grants, so the Trump administration has taken up the challenge and will start allowing states to waive regular Medicaid funding and accept the block grants reportedly for coverage of able-bodied adults. It will likely be challenged soon, because what they want to do is not legal.
"Not only are Medicaid block grant proposals morally bankrupt, they are explicitly illegal," Democratic Rep. Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts told the Washington Post. "Under this Administration, success in health care policy is measured by nothing more than how many patients are left with nowhere to turn when tragedy strikes." One conservative healthcare scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, Joseph R. Antos, agrees. "Anything that sounds like a block grant can't be done." he told the Post. "Our legal team will be carefully assessing the enforcement and litigation options with respect to the guidance document," explained Jane Perkins, legal director of the National Health Law Program.
Medicaid is structured as a federal-state program, with funding provided from the federal government with open-ended funding for maximum responsiveness to need, such as massive natural disasters displacing people and throwing them out of work and coverage or economic downturns. Block grants are a fixed federal payment, and the administration says it would offer the states freedom from complying with many of the program's rules; rules that are established by Medicaid law.
The population most likely to be affected, according to the sources of the Washington Post, will be people who gained coverage under Medicaid expanded under the Affordable Care Act, the "able-bodied adults," and wouldn't include the traditional Medicaid population—the elderly, children, pregnant women, and people with disabilities. It's the same group that the administration tried to target with work requirements in both Medicaid and food stamps—largely the working poor. So far the only expansion state that has expressed interest in the block grants is Alaska.
Posted with permission