The News & Observer

By: Tony Pugh

From 2008 to 2010, 6.7 million more Americans joined Medicaid. This program did not only provide health insurance to underprivileged Americans, but it also helped afford the 15% growth. However, 7 years later, now the Republican Congress wants to stop this progress.

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“All of the major block-grant proposals that we’ve seen in the last few years involved huge cuts to the Medicaid program. Cuts that would render it a shadow of its former self,” said Joan Alker, executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University.  Congressional Republicans feel the potential funding loss is worth the flexibility to reshape the program’s benefit structure and enrollment policies.  In exchange for federal funding, Medicaid requires states to cover low-income children, families, pregnant women and parents along with most seniors and people with disabilities who receive Supplemental Security Income, a federal income supplement for the aged, blind people and those with disabilities.  Republicans say these and other coverage mandates restrict states’ ability to tailor the program to their residents. They want more flexibility to innovate.  Alker said the call for more flexibility was overblown.  “When proponents of block grants talk about ‘more flexibility,’ they’re talking about eliminating federal benefit standards, federal cost-sharing protections and other requirements” that come with receipt of federal money, Alker said.

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