States May Drop Medicaid Expansion, CMS Says

The federal announcement this week that states may choose to expand their Medicaid programs to 138% of the federal poverty level for some period of time, and then later drop out, could provoke some states deeply opposed or on the fence to reconsider.

But the news doesn't answer many of the big questions that remain, says Matt Salo, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors.

Earlier this week, Cindy Mann, director of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' Center for Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) spoke in Chicago at the National Conference of State Legislatures in an effort to clarify the issue.

"A state can decide when to come in, if to come in and also, if a state does adopt the expansion and determines at a later time, for whatever reason, that it does not want to maintain the expansion, it could also decide, because it’s a voluntary program, to drop the expansion," Mann told the American Hospital Association, which included the statement in a news briefing late Tuesday.