States Consider Medicaid Cuts as Use Grows

By KEVIN SACK and ROBERT PEAR
NYT

WASHINGTON — Facing relentless fiscal pressure and exploding demand for government health care, virtually every state is making or considering substantial cuts in Medicaid, even as Democrats push to add 15 million people to the rolls.

Because they are temporarily barred from reducing eligibility, states have been left to cut “optional benefits,” like dental and vision care, and reduce payments to doctors and other health care providers.

In some states, governors are trying to avoid the deepest cuts by pushing for increases in tobacco taxes or new levies on hospitals and doctors, but many of those proposals are running into election-year trouble in conservative legislatures.

In Nevada, which faces an $881 million budget gap, Gov. Jim Gibbons, a Republican, proposed this month to end Medicaid coverage of adult day care, eyeglasses, hearing aids and dentures, and, for a savings of $829,304, to reduce the number of diapers provided monthly to incontinent adults (to 186 from 300).

(More here.)