The Joint Finance Committee (JFC) voted today for the Special Session bill that delays all the BadgerCare changes until April 1, 2014, and also extends the state’s high risk plan (HIRSP) until that date. The bill was approved by a vote of 11 to 2, with two Democrats voting against the proposal because of the delay in coverage for childless adults. You can read about the debate in the committee on the WisPolitics Budget Blog.

Democrats on the committee offered two amendments, both of which were rejected on party-line votes. The first of those would have increased BadgerCare eligibility for adults to 133% of the poverty level, thereby enabling the state to get full federal funding for coverage of childless adults over the next three years. The Legislative Fiscal Bureau calculated that change would save the state $86.4 million GPR during the current biennium, while covering 85,000 more adults after April 1 than the budget bill and the Governor’s current plan.
The second amendment offered by the Democrats would have changed the bill by initiating the childless adult coverage in January rather than delaying it until April (while delaying the other BadgerCare changes). That would allow the state to fulfill the Governor’s promise not to create a “coverage gap” for people below the poverty level, and would cost the state about $21 million GPR.

The committee did approve one amendment, which makes some uncontroversial changes regarding the disposition of any leftover funding for the HIRSP program, after it is ended on March 31. That amendment was approved unanimously.

I wasn’t able to attend the public hearing before the committee vote, which I regret because I would have liked to raise a couple of issues that I didn’t hear addressed during the executive session.  For one, I would have liked to hear a discussion of the implications of delaying by three months state implementation of the new federal definitions for measuring income and family size. That delay means that the state and federal computer systems will be making significantly different determinations of family income (relative to the poverty level) during the first three months of 2014.  I think that’s going to be extremely confusing for applicants, providers, caseworkers, assisters, insurance agents and everyone else involved.

Also, I was disappointed that during the executive session there was no discussion of why the Special Session bill is going to make the Dept. of Corrections swallow the $2.8 million cost they will incur because it delays obtaining federal Medicaid cost-sharing for the state’s spending for hospitalized inmates. Considering that the bill saves the state $23 million GPR, it would have been easy to provide the money needed by DOC to offset the lost Medicaid funding.  Based on past experience, I worry that DOC will shift their fiscal problem to the counties by cutting the Youth Aids allocations that offset some of the costs of local juvenile justice programs.

The Assembly is scheduled to take up the bill this Wednesday, December 4, but it appears that the Senate won’t act on it until Dec. 19.  You can read more about the bill and the committee debate in a good Journal Sentinel article by Patrick Marley.

Jon Peacock