Members of the House and Senate health and welfare committees have a lot on their plates this session as they’re being tasked with finding $22 million in cuts to help balance Idaho’s budget.
That’s the amount of money Gov. Brad Little left up to lawmakers to cut from Medicaid in his proposed budget. It’s also in addition to the $23 million Little cut from Medicaid provider rates last fall.
Rep. Josh Tanner (R-Eagle), who co-chairs the Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee, told his peers on House Health and Welfare Tuesday to scrounge up the further cuts.
Despite a strong uptick in tax collections last month, Tanner said hard decisions need to be made.
“I don’t like to budget on hope or assumptions that we’re going to grow our way out of this economically,” he said. “At some point in time we have to go, ‘Nope, [these programs] need to get cut right now.”
Tanner told the committee to be skeptical of state agencies that say cutting services advances the minute hand on the doomsday clock.
Tanner said he’s had those conversations himself.
“And it was always like, ‘This will blow up the world if [you] do this,’ and then I do it and we pass it and it goes through and then the next year nothing really happened.”
Rep. Don Hall (R-Twin Falls)said however these cuts are made, legislators need to be aware of potential downstream effects.
“Certainly it will look good if you can cut budgets on the state level, but if that just cost shifts down to the counties, the same citizens are paying the same taxes,” Hall said.
Before voters passed Idaho’s Medicaid expansion program into law through a ballot initiative in 2018, counties shared the responsibility of indigent health care costs. At times, the Catastrophic Health Care Fund ran annual budgets totaling tens of millions of dollars.
People who could not cover the cost of their medical bills historically applied for relief in their county and needed to get approval from their commissioners and a state board to access those funds.
The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare requested $91.7 million to cover the state’s share of Medicaid expansion in the coming fiscal year.
Any proposed cuts to Medicaid coverage are expected to come before JFAC in early February.
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