Medicaid rolls swell in Washington area

Enrollment in Virginia and the District of Columbia increased by 10.5 percent and 10.6 percent, respectively — both above the national increase of 8.2 percent, according to a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

John Folkemer, Medicaid director for Maryland, cited two reasons for the increase in the state.

“One, of course, is the economy,” he said.

Another reason is the state’s expansion of income eligibility for the program in July 2008 from between 30 and 40 percent of the poverty line to 116 percent.

“It’s really the combination of that expansion and the economy” that would make the increase higher than other states, he said.

Virginia has seen an increase in Medicaid enrollment since January, and the state is projecting a minimum of 270,000 new enrollees as the new federal health legislation takes place, said Virginia Secretary of Health and Human Resources Bill Hazel.

Nationally, enrollment in the health insurance program for low-income earners swelled by 3.69 million from December 2008 to December 2009 to 48.48 million — the program’s largest increase since the early days of implementation in the late 1960s, the report said. It concluded that the growth would have been much smaller and more Americans would have been insured without federal funds — monies

that played out prominently as Maryland and Virginia crafted their budgets this year.

Maryland, unlike Virginia, assumed in its fiscal 2011 budget passed in April that the Medicaid funding, part of the federal stimulus bill, would be extended — leaving the state in limbo as Congress weighed the extension during the summer.

But the $26 billion extension to the stimulus will give Maryland about $272 million to fill a nearly $400 million budget hole, and Gov. Martin O’Malley may no longer need to tap the state’s reserve fund as a result.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell has estimated that the law will cost the state $1.5 billion between 2014 and 2022.

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