Pa.'s GOP governor, struggling for re-election, will expand Medicaid through managed-care firms

Pennsylvania "won federal approval to expand its Medicaid program to nearly 500,000 low-income adults on Thursday, becoming the ninth state led by a Republican governor to join the expansion under the president's health-care law," Jason Millman reports for The Washington Post. Republican "Gov. Tom Corbett had sought the Obama administration's permission to use money authorized by the Affordable Care Act to purchase private health insurance for poor adults. With Thursday's announcement, Corbett and the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services instead agreed to a plan to expand the program through managed-care organizations," most of which are subsidaries of health-insurance companies. (American Prospect map)

Twenty-six states and Washington, D.C., have expanded Medicaid under the reform law, including nine states with Republican governors. "Corbett, whose re-election campaign is suffering, joins Republican governors like Jan Brewer of Arizona and New Jersey's Chris Christie who oppose the ACA but have taken the law's billions of dollars to expand coverage to its poorest citizens," Millman writes. "The federal government will pay the full costs of the expansion population through 2016, and the federal reimbursement will gradually lower to 90 percent in 2020 — still much better than the average 57 percent federal match rate for the traditional program." The rate is higher in states with greater poverty.

"Before Thursday's announcement, Pennsylvania had one of the largest Medicaid-eligible populations among states that hadn't yet expanded their programs," Millman writes. "A report from the Urban Institute earlier this month estimated states that haven't expanded their programs are missing out on a combined $423 billion in federal funding between 2013 and 2022." (Read more)