Lynchburg News Advance: Virginia Needs to Expand Medicare

At the moment Virginia finds itself in a deadlock over the expansion of Medicaid.  On one side are Gov. McAuliffe, the Virginia Senate and most of the business community not to mention the state's hospital associations.  On the other is the GOP controlled House of Delegates which in its quest to pander to the racists in the party base continues to say "No" to anything tied to America's first black president.  The estimated 400,000 Virginians who would benefit from Medicaid expansion, including many poor children, simply do not matter to these extremists in the Virginia GOP who are so stupid that they refuse to grasp that all of us are already paying for the uninsured but in the least cost effective manner possible.  A main editorial in Lynchburg's News Advance makes the case as to why Medicaid must be expanded.  Here are excerpts:

The Republican House of Delegates and Gov. Terry McAuliffe and the Democratic Virginia Senate continue their standoff over the budget and Medicaid expansion. Stuck in the middle are thousands of state employees, local governments, public school systems, public colleges and universities and 8 million Virginians.

Ladies and gentlemen in Richmond, it’s time to negotiate, craft a compromise and get the commonwealth out of the Medicaid corner it’s been painted into.
 

When President Obama and Congress crafted the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, in 2009 and 2010, a key element was reform of Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement rates for the nation’s hospitals. Gone was the old system of pay-for-services, replaced with incentives for the system to keep would-be patients healthy and out of the acute care system. As an industry, hospitals signed on to the changes because part of the bargain was that more people would be covered, especially through Medicaid, leaving hospitals harm-free in the final analysis.

Many states have taken advantage of the tax dollars Washington is directing back to them to expand Medicaid, but many others — primarily those controlled by Republicans — have not.

Virginia falls into the latter category, and thus the current stalemate we find ourselves in.

The Democratic Virginia Senate, working with Democratic Gov. McAuliffe, has approved a state budget that expands Medicaid but by working through private insurance providers. The Republican House simply says no to Medicaid expansion, period.

The money for Medicaid expansion is tax money Virginians are already sending to Washington ... if Virginia doesn’t accept it, it simply goes to states that already expanded Medicaid. In Virginia, we’re talking about $2 billion per year.

The federal government would pay 100 percent of the costs of expansion through 2016, slowly dropping over the next decade to no less than 90 percent of the costs.

It’s the hit to hospitals across Virginia that has people worried though. The University of Virginia Medical Center and the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center will see roughly $500 million sliced from their budgets. Here in Lynchburg, Centra officials estimate they’ll lose roughly $17.3 million. Smaller hospitals could simply be forced to close their doors.

Caught in the crosshairs in this budget/Medicaid fight are real people who could be harmed by the actions — or inactions — of ideologically driven politicians. They deserve better.

On their behalf, we repeat our original exhortation to our legislators: Negotiate, craft a compromise and get the commonwealth out of the corner you’ve painted it into.