(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers March 25, 2013)
Opening the door?
Maybe you’ve been around Statehouse politics the right amount of time when a floor amendment to a bill that sounds like it does one thing does it…and a whole lot more.
That’s what happened last week when Sen. Dennis Pyle, R-Hiawatha, got an amendment added to the Senate’s budget bill that bluntly states that not one dime of state money will be spent to expand the state’s Medicaid—now cleverly renamed KanCare—program without legislative approval.
Pyle and a lot of members of the Legislature don’t want Gov. Sam Brownback to take up the offer from the federal government to expand by more than 100,000 the number of Kansans who qualify for federally paid health care. The deal: If Kansas expands eligibility for Medicaid, the federal government will pay the entire bill for health care for the first three years of the expansion, and then drop to paying 90 percent of the cost of that expansion.
It’s that fourth year that has conservatives scared: Hundreds of millions of dollars that Kansas will have to chip in for the continuation of that health care to the near-poor who don’t qualify for Medicaid now, but would under the expansion.