On March 3, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, released The Administration’s Medicaid Regulations: State-by-State Impacts. The report details the effects of seven regulations issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that would make major, wide-ranging changes in Medicaid.
The report finds that the state estimates of the fiscal impact of the CMS regulations are significantly higher than the $15 billion impact projected by the administration for the next five years. States estimated that the regulations would reduce federal payments to them by nearly $50 billion over the next five years, more than three times the administration’s estimate.
The large discrepancy between the state estimates and the CMS estimates is evidence that the regulations are likely to have a much larger fiscal and programmatic impact on state Medicaid programs and state budgets than people realize. Download the report.
