County Board Resistance Shortchanges More than 1,200 Adults Losing Their BadgerCare Coverage
The Barron County Board was unable to muster enough votes last week to accept funding for two new positions to help people sign up for coverage under the health care reform law. It appears to be the only county to balk at accepting the state and federal Medicaid funding included in the biennial budget bill to help counties cope with a surge of new applications for subsidized insurance.
An article Thursday morning in Wisconsin Health News quotes Barron County board member Gary Nelson, who explained his opposition:
“There’s no clarity at the national level as to even if it’s going to be implemented. There’s total chaos at the state level so I’m just not comfortable with creating two more positions I’m not really sure we’re going to ever need.”
Even though a narrow majority of Nelson’s colleagues on the board disagreed with him and voted for the two positions, their votes fell short of the two-thirds needed to pass the resolution.Although many people (myself included) would like to see more clarity in various aspects of ACA implementation, one thing that appears to be quite clear is that more than 90,000 adults are going to lose their BadgerCare coverage next year because Governor Walker and the Legislature decided to move them from Medicaid into subsidized private plans purchased through the new health insurance Marketplace. According to a very preliminary Dept. of Health Services (DHS) estimate, 1,278 of those adults live in Barron County.
Rejecting the added caseworker positions will make it harder for those county residents to get help in transitioning to a Marketplace insurance plan, as well as for the uninsured in Barron County to sign up for BadgerCare or Marketplace coverage. Regardless of whether we think state lawmakers made the right decisions regarding BadgerCare and the federal Medicaid funding, all of us need to work together to make the new health insurance Marketplace an alternative to BadgerCare for low-income adults, in order to prevent a surge in the number of uninsured people in our communities.
Sometimes people seem to think that BadgerCare and other public assistance programs, such as the new Marketplace subsidies, are primarily aimed at people in urban areas. However, BadgerCare statistics illustrate that’s not the case. Barron County has a significantly higher share of BadgerCare recipients than its share of the state population. My analysis of enrollment data and Census Bureau figures indicates that non-elderly adults in Barron County are 38% more likely than those in the rest of the state to be enrolled in BadgerCare. Rural areas also have a disproportionate share of the uninsured. (See WCCF’s Dec. 2012 analysis.)
The funding that the Barron County Board isn’t taking won’t go unspent; it will be used by surrounding counties. DHS has divided all the counties into enrollment regions (“consortia”), and neighboring counties in the 10-county Great Rivers Consortium will be called on to help close the gap left by Barron County’s decision.
Read more about that decision in the ABC News story reported last week by WQOW in Eau Claire.
Jon Peacock
