President Trump hasn’t weighed in publicly in the current fight. Members of the administration have been working to smooth the way for changing former President Barack Obama’s health-care law. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price attended the governors’ meeting Saturday afternoon. At issue is whether to maintain significant federal funding for states that have expanded eligibility for Medicaid to include residents with income that is up to a third more than the federal poverty level. GOP-led states split almost evenly in opting to take the funds to expand eligibility for their programs. States that didn’t have cited a concern about the impact on the federal budget and a desire to resist Mr. Obama’s health law.
Republican governors in states that expanded Medicaid have been telling their congressional delegations for months that repealing the health-care law without an adequate replacement would cost their budgets and hurt hospitals. While many say they support repealing Obamacare, they’ve advised a heavy dose of caution. Republican leaders in Washington are considering ending the Medicaid expansion, as well as setting per-person caps on federal funding of the program. “Governors know about 50 times more about Medicaid than anyone in Congress,” said Haley Barbour, the former Republican governor of Mississippi. “The idea that we’re going to repeal, repair, replace, redundant, whatever -- the idea that we’re going to do that in a matter of weeks just ignores the difficulty of doing it,” Barbour said.
