A new study says Medicaid expansion will cost Wisconsin taxpayers $600 million per year. The findings by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty and UW Economist Noah Williams are welcomed by Republican lawmakers like state Senator Duey Stroebel.
“Ultimately what it does to, is it moves more and more people to government insurance, and that . . . could ultimately end up as single payer, and then that becomes socialized medicine,” Stroebel said Tuesday.
Democratic Governor Tony Evers said he thinks Republican lawmakers’ opposition to accepting the federal Medicaid expansion is based on anti-federal government feelings and and opposition to the Affordable Care Act. Evers plans to do that in his upcoming budget proposal.
“We will take this directly to the people of Wisconsin. Once this budget is released, we’ll be going around the state talking about this issue,” the governor said. “The number of people that we have to convince outside of the legislature I think are very few.”
Republican legislative leaders are opposed to taking federal money to expand Medicaid in Wisconsin, but Governor Tony Evers plans to do that in his upcoming budget proposal
Wisconsin is one of more than a dozen states that have not taken federal funding to expand Medicaid to people who make up to 133 percent of the poverty level. According to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, doing so would have saved the state more than one billion dollars from 2014 through 2019.
The governor and proponents of Medicaid expansion have claimed it could make Medicaid available to more than 75,000 low-income residents while saving the state hundreds of millions of dollars.