Governors, Medicaid Expansion | featured news

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam announced Wednesday that he won't pursue expanding the state's Medicaid program to help cover the uninsured as part of the federal Affordable Care Act.

Florida governor Rick Scott created a stir this week when he said he’d expand Medicaid as requested by the Obama administration. But health policy experts say it's hard for any governor to say no to billions of dollars in federal subsidies.

Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, a leading Republican critic of President Obama’s health care law, said he now supported a three-year expansion of Medicaid to cover more poor people.

A Republican governor has decided that the federal government's plan for expanding Medicaid is in his state's best interests. Medicaid coverage will be expanded to nearly 600,000 low-income Ohioans now left out of the program as part of the state's two-year budget Gov. John R. Kasich proposed Monday.

"You are still paying for that coverage expansion but not getting the benefit of it," said Herb Kuhn, president of the Missouri Hospital Association. "So you as a state are exporting your dollars to another state. If you have some adjoining state that accepts (the Medicaid expansion) then you are basically sending your dollars to your neighbor."

Democrats say the extra federal money attached to the expansion will prove too good for most governors to pass up, especially as Medicaid and other healthcare costs continue to soar... "My guess is that they will beat up the president for passing a great bill until he's re-elected and then join up and take the money because they know it's the best thing for their states," he told Reuters.

Texas Governor Rick Perry said on Monday his state will not implement an expansion of the Medicaid program for the poor or create a health insurance exchange, leaving the state with the highest percentage of people without health insurance outside President Barack Obama's signature law.

If governors opt their states out of the health law’s Medicaid expansion — as many are now threatening to do — it’s the poorest Americans who would find themselves getting the rawest deal.