Cosmic Irony: States That Didn't Expand Medicaid Paying More For The Program

Cosmic Irony: States That Didn't Expand Medicaid Paying More For The Program:



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States that refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act are now paying the price, literally.

A new Kaiser Family Foundation report released last week suggests that the Republican-controlled non-expansion states are seeing their share of Medicaid costs rise more sharply than expansion states.

The trend undercuts a popular argument against the Medicaid expansion in states where Republican leaders continue to resist opting into the program, under which the federal government pays 100 percent of costs through 2016 and at least 90 percent share after.

“We did see a higher growth rate of what states spent of their own dollars on Medicaid in the in non-expansion states than we did in the expansion states” said Laura Snyder, a senior policy analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation. The report found that total spending in expansion states grew by 17.7 percent, but the state spending only grew by 3.4 percent. Meanwhile, state spending on Medicaid in non-expansion states increased by 6.9 percent as total spending rose by 6.1 percent.