The Oklahoma Constitution requires the state legislature to pass a balanced budget every year. While passing a balanced budget forces legislators to make hard choices, it also keeps our state from digging itself into debt.
This year, falling oil prices and other factors led to state legislators facing a $1.3 billion budget shortfall going into 2017. To make up for the shortfall, the Oklahoma Health Care Authority prepared Oklahoma Medicaid providers for the possibility of a 25 percent rate cut.
It doesn’t take a health care expert to understand that a rate cut of this magnitude would be detrimental to Oklahoma’s health care providers. Luckily, our state legislature worked to develop a 2017 state budget that shields Medicaid providers from a large rate cut.
Oklahoma’s potential Medicaid crisis wasn’t just a result of the state’s budget shortfall. The Medicaid program is broken – so broken that it is driving the federal and state governments into bankruptcy.
We need to take charge and reform Medicaid to ensure that the program works in states and for people. I’ve proposed a bill to help set us in the right direction: the Preserving Access to Medicaid for Americans (PAMA) Act of 2016.
The PAMA Act targets two flaws in Obamacare that have placed unnecessary burdens on our state: mandated hospital cuts that will kick in starting Fiscal Year 2018, and restrictions on the state’s ability to readjust the eligibility requirements for some Medicaid related programs.
Hospitals that serve a large number of people who are uninsured receive Medicaid funding, called Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) payments, to make up for the cost of caring for these patients.
Obamacare contains a provision that mandates annual cuts to DSH payments to pay for other parts of Obamacare, like state Medicaid expansion. The PAMA Act would protect states, like Oklahoma, that haven’t expanded Medicaid under Obamacare from the DSH cuts.
Oklahoma made a fiscally responsible decision when it refused to expand Medicaid under Obamacare. Why should our state’s hospitals be forced to pay for other states’ Medicaid expansion? The first thing the PAMA Act does is make the states that have chosen to expand Medicaid pay for it themselves.
The second area the PAMA Act focuses on is Oklahoma’s Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, which provides health insurance coverage for children and expecting mothers. Under Obamacare, there is a requirement called Maintenance of Effort (MOE), which prohibits Oklahoma from adjusting the eligibility criteria for the CHIP program until 2019. The PAMA Act strikes the MOE and gives our state the flexibility it needs right now to restructure CHIP in a way that makes the most sense for our communities and to ensure the program is sustainable in the long-term.
Oklahoma will always be required to balance its budget, so the federal government needs to get rid of the burdensome laws that cost states millions of dollars and prevent Medicaid programs from working. Passing the PAMA Act would set us in the right direction.
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