Medicaid Funding for States Closer to Passage
Jos Linn and Meredith Dodson
August 09, 2010
Yesterday, after months of trying, the Senate passed a bill that would provide temporary funding to states to help with Medicaid and teachers’ salaries. The vote was 61-39. As you know, in 2009, Congress passed a temporary funding increase for Medicaid to help states maintain the program during the economic downturn; that funding runs out in December. However, states are still facing severe budget challenges and have requested an extension of this funding while the economy continues to recover. This bill would extend this funding another 6 months. Without it, states will be forced to cut vital services and lay off thousands of workers.
The House will briefly come back to Washington next Tuesday to vote on the Senate bill. While not guaranteed, leadership is optimistic it will pass. RESULTS is pleased that Congress is poised to pass this important aid to states, but it is not all good news. In order to guarantee passage, the Senate had to fully pay for the funding. Part of the money used to pay for it again comes from SNAP. Just like Medicaid, SNAP received a temporary funding increase as part of the economic recovery bill. So as to avoid a sharp drop in benefits once the recovery funding ended, Congress designed benefits to gradually go down to normal levels over several years (through 2014). However, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that because food prices have not risen as expected, that gradual drawdown of benefits will not end until 2018, beyond what was intended. The Senate therefore moved the drawdown completion date back to 2014 and used the money saved to help pay for the aid to states. The child nutrition bill, on the other hand, moves that drawdown back further to 2013, which is not what the recovery bill intended and is why we are pushing back strongly against it.
RESULTS soundly rejects the practice of taking needed money from critical anti-poverty programs to pay for other anti-poverty programs. We should not be using the poor to fund the poor. We cannot change the funding in the Medicaid bill and if it fails there is little hope this critical Medicaid funding will be forthcoming. However, we can still change the child nutrition bill by urging the House to pass its own bill with appropriate offsets (see above).
These are the tough choices we sometimes have to make. But it demonstrates the vital importance of people who advocate for America’s poor. It is only strong grassroots advocates like you who can shape the debate in a way that these tradeoffs are never considered. Thank you for all you do.
