Latest news with #MatthewRohrbach
Yahoo
31-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
WV lawmakers put Medicaid expansion trigger bill on inactive calendar
Dozens of people gathered Monday, March 31, 2025, to speak against a bill that would have implemented a trigger to end the state's Medicaid expansion program if the federal government changes the federal matching rate. House leaders pulled the bill, saying they received word that the federal government will not change its match. (Rafael Barker | West Virginia Women's Alliance) West Virginia lawmakers on Monday walked back a measure that would have put more than 165,000 residents at risk of losing their health care coverage through Medicaid expansion. House Bill 3518 would have put in place a trigger so that if the federal government lowered the rate at which it pays for the Medicaid expansion program, West Virginia residents on the program would be disenrolled and the expansion program would be eliminated. The House of Delegates Rules committee moved the bill to the inactive calendar Monday because of strong assurances from the federal government that it will not change its share of the cost, said Deputy House Speaker Del. Matthew Rohrbach, R-Cabell. 'That bill was, in effect, a message to Washington, and it got communicated back to me Saturday from someone dealing with the negotiations in Washington: they've heard us loud and clear. These changes to Medicaid don't appear as though now they are going to occur,' he told reporters. Medicaid is a joint health care program between the state and the federal government. Under the Affordable Care Act, 41 states, including West Virginia, have expanded their Medicaid programs to cover families who make up to 138% of the federal poverty line. West Virginia expanded its program in 2014. The federal government currently matches coverage of those in expanded Medicaid at a 90/10 match. As the federal government considers cuts to Medicaid, at least 12 states have enacted trigger laws like House Bill 3518 in case the federal government decides to lower the rate at which they fund the expansion portion of the program. House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay, said leaders are in communication almost daily with the state's federal delegation. 'We got some very fairly encouraging news over the weekend that the most recent version of what the president and some of the leadership of the current Congress is pursuing doesn't implicate that bill in the way that we were originally told that it would,' Hanshaw said. 'So we didn't feel a need to move forward at this time.' Rohrback said he feels confident that the federal government will not change the federal matching rate for the program. 'I was told Saturday by the congressional people that they have heard a firestorm over this from red states, blue states and purple states,' Rohrbach said. 'We are all saying that the federal government made a deal. You've got to stay with it if we're going to have to stay with it. That's only fair, because the states just cannot absorb that kind of a new budget request.' The bill originated in the House Finance Committee last week and was advanced to the floor, where it would have been on first reading Monday. House Democrats have criticized saying that it would take health care from 160,000 West Virginians, including children, people with disabilities and the elderly. 'This is not what we were sent here to do, but unfortunately after 45 days of doing nothing, the Republicans have tipped their hand as to what their priority is, and that's to take health care away from nearly 10% of our state,' Del. John Williams, D-Monongalia County, said in a post on social media. If the federal government dropped its Medicaid expansion match from 90% to 73%, the rate at which it funds the rest of the program, that would cost the state about $170 million in addition to the $100 million it already pays for Medicaid expansion, officials say. In West Virginia, 166,000 West Virginians are covered under Medicaid expansion. Before the bill was pulled, health care advocates and Medicaid recipients gathered outside the House chambers Monday morning to urge lawmakers not to pass it. South Charleston resident Paula Lepp and her family would lose health care if Medicaid expansion were to be eliminated in the state. Lepp and her husband, a full-time storyteller, have qualified for Medicaid for a few years since the COVID-19 pandemic led to them losing nearly 80% of their income. Lepp was diagnosed with breast cancer last fall. She's had several surgeries since then and is scheduled for another on April 18. Now, she worries she won't have health insurance by then. 'I'm sitting here worried, stressed out about what that is going to look like for our family,' Lepp said. 'What does that look like for my recovery, if we have to choose between finding the money for my surgery and finding the money to continue helping [my daughter] pay for college, or having her go into massive amounts of debt. 'What a horrible choice that we're going to have to make,' she said. Rich Sutphin, executive director of the West Virginia Rural Health Association, said that cutting Medicaid expansion would be devastating to the state's rural hospitals, five of which are already at immediate risk of closure. 'A cut like this to our health care delivery system would be catastrophic for those five hospitals,' he said. 'So we're advocating for the House of Delegates to vote no on House Bill 3918.' According to the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, Medicaid expansion contributes about a billion every year to the state's health care economy. '[Ending Medicaid expansion] would more than double the state's uninsured rate, harm health, put hospitals at risk of closure, and likely result in a significant loss of health care jobs throughout the state,' the organization wrote in a post. Dan Hager, executive director Ebenizer Medical Outreach, a free and charitable clinic in Huntington that provides care to people without health care and on Medicaid, also spoke against the bill. 'When we talk about how 166,000 of our friends and neighbors could lose their coverage, I know what that looks like,' Hager said. 'That looks like someone you know, someone you go to church with, someone in your family, someone you work with, walking into the pharmacy to pick up their diabetes medicine, to pick up their blood pressure medicine, and finding out they can no longer afford it because they got disenrolled by their insurance coverage and they didn't even realize. It means someone you know going to the infusion center to get their chemo delivered and be told that they're not going to be able to get their treatment that day because they no longer have their Medicaid coverage.' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
28-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
CON repeal, a Morrisey priority, fails again as WV House strongly rejects discharging bill to floor
Dels. Matthew Rohrbach, Brandon Steele and J.B. Akers discuss House Rules at the speaker's podium on Friday, March 28, 2025, as confusion dominated the debate to discharge House Bill 2007 from committee to the floor. (Perry Bennett | West Virginia Legislative Photography) Another nail was hammered into the coffin of Certificate of Need repeal on Friday, as the West Virginia House of Delegates overwhelmingly voted down — after a drawn out 'fiasco' over rules and procedure — a motion to discharge House Bill 2007. With 10 members absent and not voting, lawmakers in the body voted 72-15 against discharging the bill. The discharge motion, if successful, would have brought the original version of HB 2007 — a bill to totally repeal the Certificate of Need process in the state — to the House floor, where the full body would have considered it for the first time. The bill died last month in the House Committee on Health and Human Resources when lawmakers voted 13-12 against it. Del. Chris Anders, R-Berkeley, made the motion to discharge the bill from committee and to the floor, saying members should support his motion because HB 2007 'will end the government created monopoly on health care.' In response to Anders, Del. Carl Martin, R-Upshur, immediately made a motion to table his discharge motion. But Martin's motion, said Del. Matthew Rohrbach, R-Cabell, who was acting as speaker, was out of order and not allowed based on rules of the chamber. This is despite a motion to table a discharge motion previously being successful earlier this session. That previous motion and vote, Rohrbach said, should have been out of order as well. Del. Brandon Steele, R-Raleigh, called for a motion to overturn Rohrbach's ruling, which was supported by House counsel as well as the House parliamentarian and House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, who was not present Friday. 'What are we even doing here?!' Steele exclaimed, before his motion failed 58-31. With that failed vote, and after several back-and-forths regarding the technicalities of the House Rules as well as Mason's Manual of Legislative Procedure — the rulebook that dictates House actions this year alongside the chamber's own rules — Rohrbach's ruling that Martin's motion to table the discharge motion was out of order stood as the rule of the chamber. The body then voted down Anders' original discharge motion, laying HB 2007 to rest yet again. Repealing Certificate of Need in West Virginia was one of only two health care policies that Gov. Patrick Morrisey announced as priorities for his first legislative session this year. The other policy — adding religious and philosophical exemptions to the state's vaccine mandates — failed on the House floor earlier this week. During his State of the State, Morrisey called the Certificate of Need process 'big government activism at its worst' and promised that by repealing it, the state would 'move toward the free market.' Bills to repeal CON have been introduced in the Legislature annually since at least 2017. This year marked the second time ever that the bill made it to a committee, as well as the second time it was voted down by that committee. CON is a regulatory process, overseen by the West Virginia Health Care Authority, that requires entities looking to create or expand health care services in the state to receive a legal document proving those new services fit an unmet need in the area. Through the Health Care Authority, those interested in obtaining a Certificate of Need receive technical assistance before applying to see what need they are meeting. Services are approved through a needs methodology and different services — such as hospice care, ambulatory centers, clinics, private practices and specialty services — have different methodologies. Proponents for the repeal believe that doing away with the laws will allow more competition in health care across West Virginia. Those against repeal worry that doing away with the process will hurt West Virginia's more rural and vulnerable populations, where a lack of regulation could threaten what services are offered to the 75% of residents who are government payers, meaning their health insurance comes from Medicare, Medicaid or the Public Employees Insurance Agency. While the House's version of the bill to repeal Certificate of Need seems relatively dead — all bills must be at least on first reading on the floor in their chambers of origin by Sunday — another bill has been introduced in the Senate that would do the same. Lawmakers there, however, have yet to touch it and seem unlikely to do so. In past years, there have been Hail Mary attempts to amend a total repeal of certificate of need into other bills that deal with the same section of code. It's possible the same could happen this year, as several bills that touch on Certificate of Need are still circulating as crossover day approaches next week. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
