Medicaid expansion touted as stimulus, saving lives

Louisiana sits below the national average for state spending increases on Medicaid, a House Fiscal Division’s told Wednesday’s House Appropriations subcommittee on Health and Human Services, which also heard the Medicaid dollars needed for the next fiscal year it will be the most expensive in history.
The state’s general fund spending on Medicaid has grown by an average of 6.7 percent per year from 1991 to 2016. The national average for that same per-year period is 7 percent.
For the coming fiscal year that begins July 1, about $2.2 billion of the general fund is earmarked for Medicaid.
Rebekah Gee, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health, implored subcommittee members to not focus on the size of the program but to instead look at the benefits.
“I don’t want us to focus on big,” Gee said. “Big is a misnomer. Yes, it’s big because we’re a poor state. We have almost all of our people in the state now covered. That is, in my view, a very important step.”
For the upcoming fiscal year, Medicaid would take up 92 percent of the Department of Health’s $14.2 billion budget. The department is scheduled to to take an 8.4 percent cut to its share of the general fund, though federal funding is expected to increase by 22 percent, or $1.8 billion, for next year.
Most of that federal funding increase comes from the Medicaid expansion, according to Chris Keaton, deputy director for the House Fiscal Division.
Gee lauded the health and economic benefits of the expansion, calling it the “largest federal stimulus package of money” the state will see in a long time, aside from natural disaster relief.
“Our spending on state general fund is less this year than it was last year,” Gee said. “We’re infusing over a billion dollars of capital into the state, covering over 400,000 working adults and saving lives.”