State makes money on Medicaid expansion

It’s an article of faith among many Ohio legislators that John Kasich’s Medicaid expansion is costing the state big bucks.

For example, former (and, he hopes, future) House Speaker Larry Householder has said, “The numbers are terrifying.”

Wonder what they will say when they find out that official numbers show the state actually is making money on the deal?

In the current budget year, the state is getting $62.2 million more than it spends on Medicaid expansion, the Governor’s Office of Health Transformation says. Next year, the net revenue is projected at $21.2 million. It’s less in the second year because the percentage of the tab picked up by the federal government under Obamacare is a bit lower.

But even when those federal funds drop to a 90 percent share of the cost of Medicaid expansion in 2020 (where it is scheduled to remain), the financial impact to the state of providing health coverage for 700,000 Ohioans still will be roughly a wash, the Kasich administration figures say.

That counterintuitive math stems from the state’s use of Medicaid expansion money to leverage more than $300 million a year in additional cash. For example, the health office says, the state is collecting a franchise fee from managed-care organizations that receive expansion money. That provides more than $180 million a year to state coffers.

Drug manufacturers rebate around $30 million a year for pharmaceuticals purchased with expansion funds. The state uses $18 million a year from the expansion to treat hospitalized Ohio prisoners, a bill the state otherwise would have to pay on its own.

Of course, all these numbers are good only as long as Obamacare exists. Kasich still not getting his way

Meanwhile, Kasich continues to make his pitch for a bipartisan plan to stabilize health-insurance markets. For example, he recently called Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican who was working with a Democratic senator from Washington state, Patty Murray, on a possible Obamacare patch until the effort was shut down by GOP Senate leaders.

Alexander had said he hoped to roll out the plan by the end of last week, but obviously that didn’t happen.

The Kasich adminstration’s message is that the Alexander effort is “consistent” with what the Ohio governor is pushing, while the approach taken by the bipartisan congressional Problem Solvers Caucus is almost exactly in line. The caucus, a group of about 40 Democrats and Republicans in Congress, has endorsed a plan to shore up healthinsurance exchanges and reduce premiums. Could they just mail the award?

The U.S. attorney’s office in Cleveland is getting an award later this month from the U.S. Department of Justice for successfully prosecuting a human-trafficking ring at an egg farm near Marion.

All six defendants eventually admitted their guilt to smuggling several people into Ohio from Guatemala, including children as young as 14, and forcing them to live and work in deplorable conditions.

The case was handled by the federal prosecutor’s civil rights unit.

But don’t expect that unit to go to Washington to get the award. The new U.S. attorney appointed by President Donald Trump, Justin Herdman, disbanded it last week.

“We are still as committed to human-trafficking cases today as we were a year ago, regardless of the unit handling them,” said Mike Tobin, spokesman for the office.