Tagged: Affordable care Act

A new national report says expanding Medicaid eligibility in Ohio under the Affordable Care Act would reduce the number of uninsured residents by half.

It would also cost the state an additional $3.1 billion in the next decade.

The Dayton Daily News says the numbers come from a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a Washington-based nonpartisan health care policy research organization.

The plan is to make Ohio Medicaid a cabinet-level agency starting halfway through the next two year budget cycle on July 1, 2014. Right now Medicaid is housed in the Department of Job and Family Services, but is also administered by five other state agencies.  Greg Moody is the head of the Governor’s Office of Health Transformation.

“We realized that the organization of the program itself was stifling innovation," says Moody.

Medicaid is a nearly $19 billion program – it’s a third of the state budget and growing. But Moody says this move isn’t designed to cut the budget.