Buried inside a Senate bill designed to stimulate the country’s lagging economy is a provision that could stimulate West Virginia to the tune of 270 million dollars.
It’s a temporary increase in Medicaid funding. Medicaid is a joint state and federal program to provide health care to low-income children, people with disabilities and the elderly.
If the bill passes Congress and is signed into law, West Virginia could receive up to $270 million in new funds for the program, according to Families USA, a national nonprofit that promotes affordable health care.
This year, the federal government is giving West Virginia about 74 cents for every dollar it spends on Medicaid. Under the proposed increase next year, that will increase to 82 cents.
This money could help extend Medicaid coverage to more people, said Delegate Don Purdue, chairman of the House Health and Human Resources Committee.
“The budget for Medicaid is about 2.6 billion dollars. So you can see that there’s a tremendous amount of money that’s being spent over there in that program, and yet the needs still aren’t being met 100 percent of the time,” he said.
“So I think that’ll help us achieve that business of reaching out and getting all those folks that aren’t receiving services right now.”
But the money should be spent on more than just increasing eligibility, said Perry Bryant of West Virginians for Affordable Health Care.
“We should both expand the number of people covered by Medicaid—West Virginia has one of the most restrictive eligibility criteria in the country—but we should also increase reimbursements to providers,” he said.
“Both hospitals and physicians, few of them are seeing new Medicaid recipients. If you increase eligibility without increasing access, you probably won’t accomplish an awful lot.”
The extra money would, however, only be a temporary increase to stimulate the economy. Department of Health and Human Resources spokesman John Law says the state should proceed with caution.
“What you have to be careful of, and we won’t know until the final bill, is the Feds often do things like say, ‘We’re going to give you extra money now and if you do anything, if you increase any coverage, if you add more people, you can’t cut them off if we take the money away,’” he said. “So we’ll have to wait until we see the final bill to know exactly how this money will be spent and how it will help us.”
The stimulus bill is still being debated in the U.S. Senate. Supporters hope to have it reach President-elect Obama’s desk by inauguration day.