Issue Position: Further Expanding Medicaid

Issue Position

One of the great things about America is that we have fifty laboratories all working simultaneously to solve similar problems. In Maine, they tried expanding Medicaid to include able-bodied adults, just as Prop 3 proposes to do in Utah. What they found was that the people who desperately needed Medicaid services (the impoverished elderly and the disabled) were being crowded out and denied services because the federal match for able-bodied people was 95%, whereas the traditional Medicaid population could only receive a 50-60% federal match. This forced cash-strapped providers to refuse services for their neediest clients, so Maine did away with their expansion after all.

During this year's legislative session, we extended Medicaid coverage to 70,000 additional low-income people in Utah. We also made it so that anyone leaving prison or jail is automatically covered by Medicaid for two months while they get their post-incarceration lives in order. [They did this to reduce recidivism so that released inmates can go to the doctor as needed rather than returning to drugs to deal with depression, anxiety, etc.] So we are getting there! More people are getting coverage, but I do not want to see the system overwhelmed to cover able-bodied adults at the expense of other needs.

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