POLITICO Pro Wyoming turns down Medicaid expansion

Wyoming has become yet another state where a Republican governor’s effort to expand Medicaid has been defeated by his own Legislature.

On Friday, the Wyoming Senate shot down Gov. Matt Mead’s expansion plan, and a House committee then pulled its bill. The double whammy effectively killed the state’s chances of enacting the Obamacare option this year.


Lawmakers there acted just days after the Tennessee Legislature shot down an expansion proposal by Gov. Bill Haslam. Together, the two rejections diminish the momentum that Medicaid expansion supporters were enjoying last month, when Indiana Gov. Mike Pence won federal approval of his particular plan and Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson agreed to extend that state’s “private option” program for 18 months. Both Pence and Hutchinson are also Republicans.

Mead had negotiated his alternative approach with federal officials and unveiled it in November. The SHARE plan would have connected participants to work assistance benefits while requiring some beneficiaries to pay co-pays and premiums.

But after the state Senate defeated it 19-11 on Friday afternoon, the chair of the House’s Labor, Health and Social Services Committee decided its own legislation “wasn’t going to go anywhere.”

“It was an exercise in futility,” Republican Rep. Elaine Harvey told POLITICO.

Arkansas’ bill will soon be heading to Hutchinson’s desk, and the Republican is expected to sign the measure to extend funding of the state’s “private option” program through June 2016. The bill easily cleared the three-fourths threshold needed in both chambers of the Legislature, passing 82-12 in the House on Thursday after a 29-2 vote last week in the Senate.

Because Hutchinson has called for the program to continue until the end of 2016, a separate appropriation will be needed next year to cover that six-month gap. The governor has proposed creation of a task force to devise a replacement for the private option in 2017 and to reform Medicaid more broadly.