Health and Disability

With key leaders in Congress proposing major changes to Medicaid financing through the adoption of a block grant or per capita caps, Manatt has prepared a new toolkit for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s State Health Reform Assistance Network to help states and others assess the potential implications of proposals to cap federal Medicaid funding. The toolkit provides state-by-state data on Medicaid enrollment and expenditure trends—factors that are central to establishing the amount each state would be allocated under various capped funding proposals—as well as a detailed memo describing how each data point might be used by an individual state. The primary purpose of the toolkit is to assist individual states in evaluating how they might fare, but, as discussed in this article, the state-by-state data also illustrate some of the key challenges that Congress would face in capping and allocating federal Medicaid funds.