
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 20, 1995                   TAG: 9509200051
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

MEDICAID NEXT FOR GRANT PLAN

- House Republicans proposed drastically transforming the Medicaid health care program for the poor Tuesday, urging an end to federal rules in favor of block grants to states, which would then decide whom to help and how much.

The proposal, announced at a news conference by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, would attempt to make good on GOP promises to cut Medicaid's growth rate in half and save $182 billion over seven years.

The formula, worked out with support from most Republican governors, would guarantee every state an increase of at least 2 percent a year. The grants would rise faster for states with growing numbers of poor people and nursing home residents.

Medicaid spending, after escalating at double-digit rates for years, would be slowed from a 10 percent annual increase to 4 percent by 1998. Federal grants to the states would climb from $89 billion currently to $124 billion by 2002.

That ``is a plus number. It is not a cut,'' Gingrich emphasized. He asserted the new ``MediGrant'' program ``will deliver better care with better services at less cost.''

But Democrats and advocates for the 36 million low-income, elderly and disabled now served by Medicaid contended that the Republican plan would strip away hard-won protections, including guaranteed coverage for pregnant women and young children and help for seniors reduced to poverty by nursing home bills.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., called the GOP plan ``breathtakingly heartless ... an extraordinary abdication of federal responsibility for some of the most vulnerable people in our society - poor kids, the elderly and disabled.

``Medicaid will be given to the states without any accountability. ... No one's entitled to anything.''

Medicaid spends $155 billion a year now, with states putting about $66 billion of that into the program. They would still be required to match federal aid, but under a different formula.

States would no longer automatically have to cover all pregnant women, as well as children up to age 8, with family incomes up to 133 percent of poverty.

All states would get a 7.2 percent increase in fiscal 1996. In 1997, the grants would be increased 2 percent to 9 percent, and in later years 2 percent to 6 percent. But the overall rate of growth would be slowed to 4 percent by 1998.

The Republicans said their approach would allow the states to run Medicaid far more efficiently.

by CNB