By: Health Insurance
Submitted: 2009-11-19 15:28:22 | Word Count: 594
The health insurance reform bill approved by the House on Nov. 7 could add more than 318,000 Oklahomans to the state’s Medicaid program and cost the state $128 million more each year, according to estimates from the state authority that administers the health care program for the poor.
"It will have a cost at a very tough time from a revenue standpoint in being able to afford it,” said Nico Gomez, deputy chief executive officer at the Oklahoma Health Care Authority.
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Gomez said the Health Care Authority has been trying to estimate the potential impact of various congressional proposals on health care; state legislative leaders and members of Congress have been seeking the estimates because of the major expansion of Medicaid envisioned in both the House and Senate bills.
Medicaid is a federal-state health care program that, in Oklahoma, covers primarily pregnant women and children.
But the House bill would use the program to greatly reduce the ranks of the uninsured nationwide, making everyone eligible whose income was 150 percent or less of the federal poverty level (about $33,000 per year for a family of four.)
The federal government pays an average of 57 percent for Medicaid care and states pick up the rest. The House bill says the federal government would pay an average of 91 percent for the new people added, at a cost of about $425 billion over 10 years. According to the Congressional Budget Office, states would have to come up with about $34 billion over the 10-year life of the bill.
The biggest set of people who would become newly eligible if the House bill were to become law are adults between the ages of 19 and 65 whose income is below 150 percent of the poverty level. According to the Health Care Authority, there are 219,000 Oklahomans in that category.
There are already about 57,000 children in Oklahoma who qualify for Medicaid under the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program but aren’t currently participating, and there are thousands of other low-income Oklahomans who have private insurance but are counted as eligible because Medicaid would be a payer of last resort.
Oklahoma House Speaker Chris Benge said earlier this month that, given Oklahoma’s current fiscal woes, the $128 million in additional Medicaid spending "would lead to further budget cuts, jeopardizing existing state programs and services developed for Oklahomans by Oklahomans.”
Benge said the state is using market- and consumer-driven reforms to move the state’s uninsured into private insurance.
State is among worst in uninsured
However, according to the latest Census Bureau estimates, more than 18 percent of Oklahomans didn’t have health insurance in 2007. That’s among the top 10 uninsured rates in the country.
U.S. Reps. Mary Fallin, R-Oklahoma City, and Tom Cole, R-Moore, said the House bill would put pressure on states at the worst possible time.
"Increasing access to health care for the uninsured and underinsured is an important undertaking, but we cannot do so at the expense of the fiscal stability of states,” Fallin said.
Because Oklahoma is not a wealthy state, Gomez said, the Medicaid expansion mandated in the House bill will make a lot of people eligible, including young working men and women.
