December 15, 2014
By Gregory Nickerson,
Four years into his term as Wyoming governor, Matt Mead (R) has endorsed a plan to expand Medicaid to cover an estimated 17,600 uninsured adults in the state.
[…] Mead believes the federal government has become more flexible in the types of Medicaid expansion programs they are willing to approve. That’s true, says Joan Alker of the Georgetown Health Policy Institute Center for Children and Families. At the same time, Alker believes Wyoming could have proposed it’s SHARE plan in 2012 and gotten a favorable response to its proposal for cost-sharing of premiums and copayments. Such elements had been part of state Medicaid agreements since before 2012.
“In general since the (2012) Supreme Court decision they are very interested in getting to ‘yes,’ so they have tried to be quite flexible and work with the states on new approaches to cost-sharing,” she said.
