Wyoming Governor Matt Mead voiced his support on Monday for the Wyoming Department of Health’s plan for Medicaid expansion.
Mead said in a press conference that, while he is opposed to the Affordable Care Act, he believes the time to act on Medicaid expansion in Wyoming is now.
“What I will tell the Legislature is: We have fought this,” Mead said. “I agree it is not a good piece of legislation, but as I see where we are, I think we have to be realistic and say, ‘This is the current law of the land and we need to either go forward with this’ or if the Legislature wants to come up with a different plan, I certainly would be open to that.”
Since the Supreme Court ruled that state legislatures have the option to provide Medicaid instead of enacting a healthcare requirement for all citizens, 27 states have approved the expansion. The current proposal, which was brought to a Wyoming Senate preliminary board last week, is called the Strategy for Health, Access, Responsibility and Employment (SHARE) plan.
State Sen. Charles Scott, R-Casper does not agree with the proposed strategy.
“The proposal from the Department of Health contains no meaningful attempts to control the costs of healthcare,” Scott said.
Scott believes that the Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP) should be introduced for Wyoming since it focuses on providing affordable healthcare while also limiting excessive use.
“The Oregon Health Study is an experiment from 2008 that concludes Medicaid expansion causes people to seek healthcare assistance in cases that don’t require it,” Scott said. “The experiment found that Medicaid increased non-emergent emergency room visits by seven percent, and increased hospital admittance by 30 percent.”.
Scott also believes the proposed plan will provide unneeded services.
“The problem with this expansion is that it really doesn’t offer many benefits for the people, which is why we are trying to introduce the HIP to reduce any unneeded services,” Scott said.
Some members of the legislature are not as opposed as Scott.
State Sen. Chris Rothfuss, D-Laramie, said, “The SHARE plan is really good and will help a lot of people, but I believe it isn’t being supported because it resembles Obamacare.” Rothfuss believes that the HIP is situated for Indiana and not for a smaller population.
“Most of the political rejection the SHARE plan is receiving is because any plan that involves an expansion of government control is threatening,” Rothfuss said. “There are 17,600 folks with no types of healthcare coverage or alternatives in the state of Wyoming, and federally funded healthcare can fix that.”
