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Hopes for Medicaid Expansion Quietly Die in Wyoming

Hopes for Medicaid expansion, the program intended to bring health coverage to thousands of low-income adults, have died in Wyoming.

Hopes for Medicaid expansion, the program intended to bring health coverage to thousands of low-income adults, have died in Wyoming.

 

The four-year effort to expand Medicaid in the Cowboy State expired unceremoniously in the wake of Donald Trump’s successful White House bid. The president-elect has said he will overhaul or replace the Affordable Care Act, of which growth of the Medicaid program was a key component.

 

Once touted as a means to ease the state’s budget woes by infusing the Wyoming economy with hundreds of millions of federal dollars, expansion was rejected by the Wyoming Legislature each year since 2013. Republican lawmakers called it European-style socialism. Many questioned whether the federal government would live up to its promises to continue funding most of the program, which would have provided coverage to roughly 20,000 Wyomingites.

 

Legislators dismissed Obamacare as more government growth by a liberal commander-in-chief whom they blamed for busting Wyoming’s economy through increases in another area of government: regulation of fossil fuels.

 

Gov. Matt Mead, a Republican who had championed Medicaid expansion for the past two years, said on Wednesday that he was not going to press lawmakers on the issue next year. There are too many unknowns under Trump, he said.

 

Healthy Wyoming — a coalition of business, religious, medical and advocacy groups – will also abandon its lobbying for expansion. The groups met after the election and decided to re-evaluate the political landscape, said Phoebe Stoner, executive director of the Equality State Policy Center, which coordinated the effort.

 

“I think that our takeaway is that we’re looking forward to working with the governor to find solutions to find Wyomingites affordable access to quality health care, which has always been our goal,” she said. “I think that with all the changes that have happened both at national and at the state level and locally, the landscape is different.”

 

Rep. Steve Harshman, next year’s House speaker, believes Mead’s decision on expansion was wise.

 

“The whole Medicaid program, which is for folks with disabilities and kids and those kind of things, is really under a lot of pressure under expansion,” the Casper Republican said. “When you open it up to able-bodied adults, it’s a whole lot of pressure on the system. We’ll see how this plays out with the new administration in Washington.”

 

Sen. Chris Rothfuss, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said Mead’s decision on expansion does nothing to help Wyoming’s poor, who face some of the nation’s most expensive health care costs. Many go without care.

 

“What are we going to do, kick it down the road?” Rothfuss asked.

 

Matthew White, an economics professor at the University of Delaware who studies health care, said he understands Mead’s decision. It’s futile to continue to push for the program, White said.

 

“It’s apparently a losing battle with members of his own party, and Trump’s win doesn’t make it any easier,” he said. “It’s not really clear what’s going to happen to states that have expanded Medicaid if the ACA is repealed.”

Caroline Cournoyer is GOVERNING's senior web editor.
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