In 1989, the Republican Governor of New Hampshire, Judd Gregg, had a gaping budgetary hole that he did not know how to fill. His health secretary found a solution: a tax maneuver he had learned from the vine which would oblige Washington to send millions of state from Medicaid funds.
He was called a tax on the MEDICAID supplier, and the New Hampshire was among the first states to try it. The New Hampshire imposed its hospitals and returned dollars to them as higher payments for the care of Medicaid patients. On paper, the tax has inflated the expenses of state Medicaid, allowing it to receive more counterpart funds from the federal government.
“It was a way to play at the bottom of the federal government for lack of a better term,” Gregg said recently.
What started as creative budgeting in New England has, more than four decades, a snowball in a MEDICAIDI funding pillar, the insurance program for the poor which covers 72 million Americans. Each condition except Alaska has at least one of these taxes. In some states, supplier taxes and related payments lead to more than a third of the overall federal financing of the program.
Likewise after these taxes ended, Congress Republicans now plan to reduce or end them as a means of reaching excessive federal reductions in the expenses proposed in the budget of the Chamber. If they did, this would allow the federal government to save around $ 600 billion over the next decade, a large part of the $ 880 billion in cuts that the Chamber Committee supervised Medicaid was accused of conclusion.
The change could strike certain states led by the most difficult Republicans, shows a recent analysis, because their Medicaid budgets tend to be more dependent on the tax strategy of medical suppliers.
