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At a Monday press conference at the Ohio Statehouse, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown said the changes would mean more uninsured poor people would go to emergency rooms for primary care, jacking up costs for hospitals.
“The Healthy Ohio Program would actually make it harder for Ohioans to get care, harder for Ohioans to get access to that care. These costs will prevent some Ohioans from getting the care they need. We know that. That is probably its intent,” Brown said.
In 2013, Kasich expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, and made more than 625,000 additional low-income Ohioans eligible for the health care program. The state budget bill requires that Ohio Medicaid ask federal officials to allow Ohio to charge premiums to nearly all non-disabled adults and to impose caps on annual and lifetime expenses — a set of changes branded as “Healthy Ohio.”
Brown said he is worried the federal authorities might pick and choose elements of the program when it should be rejected outright.
Enrollees would have to set up a “Buckeye Account,” which would operate like a health savings account with contributions from the individuals and the state. Money from the account would be used to cover co-pays and other medical services and serve as an incentive plan for completing health programs such as smoking cessation classes.
Ohio Medicaid says participation in the new requirements aims “to transform members into active and informed consumers of healthcare services.” And the changes are expected to cut nearly $1 billion in costs over five years and impact 1.66 million Medicaid recipients.
Ohioans at or below the federal poverty level would not be charged premiums. But for those at 10 percent to 138 percent above the poverty level, annual expense would slide from $23.76 to $99. Co-pays would also be indexed to income levels and apply to everyone except pregnant women.
The Center for Community Solutions, a Cleveland-based think tank headed by former Ohio Medicaid director John Corlett, said Healthy Ohio would likely drive vulnerable people — including foster children and women with cancer — off Medicaid “through a set of complicated, punitive and errantly applied cost-sharing policies focused on a population largely unable to meet the financial and logistical requirements of the proposal.”
Policy Matters Ohio, a liberal think tank based in Cleveland, said “The new rules would impose hardship and people would either drop out of the program or choose not to enroll.”
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