BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) – Louisiana’s new governor, Democrat John Bel Edwards, is getting a public “thank you” from President Barack Obama for rejecting the stance of his Republican predecessor and starting the process to expand the state’s Medicaid program.
Obama, for whom this is a key end-of-term policy priority, was appearing in Baton Rouge on Thursday as part of a post-State of the Union road trip.
His signature health care law, enacted in 2010, allows states to use federal money to expand Medicaid and provide health coverage to more of the working poor. The federal government pays the full cost of expansion through 2016, gradually dropping to 90 percent in 2020 and after.
Thirty other states and the District of Columbia have accepted Washington’s offer. But more than a dozen mostly conservative states have not.
In an attempt to convince holdout states to adopt the Medicaid expansion, Obama will ask Congress to provide full federal funding for the first three years after states expand their programs. That means a state that expands Medicaid this year – currently the final year for full federal funding – or any year after would get Washington to pay 100 percent of their costs for the first three years.