Montana’s Largest Newspaper: Medicaid Works for Montana—and Montana Medicaid Enrollees Work
- Monica Robinson
- Feb 8, 2019
- 2 min read
HELENA—Today, Montana’s largest newspaper, the Billings Gazette, made the case for why Medicaid is working for our state—and pointed out that most Montana Medicaid enrollees are working themselves.
Republican lawmakers have been talking about making costly, ineffective changes to Medicaid that could kick Montanans off their health care, like implementing work requirements and asset testing.
But the facts speak for themselves: Most Montana Medicaid recipients are already working, and those who aren’t are often too sick to work, full-time caregivers, students, or seasonal workers.
Supporters of a Medicaid work requirement have a lot of explaining to do if they’re going to rip people off their health care to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.
Read more below:
Gazette Editorial
January 24, 2019
Highlights:
“Montana’s [HELP] Act has helped businesses in every county as it provided health care coverage to low-income workers, including folks with multiple part-time and seasonal jobs over the past three years.”
“[It] is important to remember that 96 percent of enrollees already had jobs or couldn’t work. The DLI HELP-Link program could be most helpful to the small minority ‘not working for unknown reasons.’”
“... more than half of Montana businesses had at least one employee enrolled in the Medicaid expansion authorized by the 2015 HELP Act. Most of these employers are small businesses.”
“The HELP Act supplies coverage that would cost employers several thousand dollars a year per worker if purchased on the private insurance market. The law provides health care access for low-income workers on the job and between seasonal jobs. HELP helps people get healthy and stay healthy enough to work.”
“Most HELP Act enrollees already work if they can. Any changes in requirements, reporting and verification must be carefully written to avoid making compliance so onerous that Montana workers lose coverage. Legislators must take care that regulations don’t cost more than they ‘save.’”
Read full article here.
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