December 29, 2014
By Dan Mangan,
Winter has just started, but the heat could be rising soon on Florida to expand its Medicaid program under Obamacare.
Florida so far has resisted calls and significant financial incentives to expand Medicaid eligibility for nearly all poor adults—a move that could offer health coverage to 670,000 or more currently uninsured people in the state.
Florida and Texas, which itself has a million or so people who could potentially benefit from such a step, are the biggest of the 16 remaining states that have yet to either expand or be in active discussions to adopt expanded Medicaid benefits.
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If Florida flips, “it would be a big deal,” said Joan Alker, executive director at the Center for Children and Families and research associate professor at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute.
Georgetown’s Alker said she expects that all states will eventually follow suit because of those factors. But she admitted to be “a little bit surprised” by how quickly the pace has picked up in 2014.
While Florida will ask for another extension of the funding authority, Alker said she believes that CMS’ refusal in 2014 to extend the funding authority for more than a year “was a signal by the federal government that they’re not going to extend this [program] in its current form when there is Medicaid expansion on the table, and your state is rejecting it.”
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