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Published: 2022-06-28 19:17:49 Updated: 2022-06-28 19:17:49
Posted June 28, 2022 7:17 p.m. EDT
By Travis Fain, WRAL state government reporter
The North Carolina House backed a pathway to Medicaid expansion Tuesday, continuing a game of legislative chicken with the state Senate, which has passed a competing plan.
What that means for final passage of the policy, which could extend taxpayer funded health insurance to hundreds of thousands of North Carolina’s working poor, remains to be seen. The chairman of the House Health Committee, state Rep. Donny Lambeth, acknowledged Tuesday that the prospects remain slim despite the lop-sided vote in the House, which passed the proposal 101-6.
Top Republicans in the General Assembly have been back and forth over the issue for weeks after a surprising shift this year that saw GOP lawmakers get on board with expansion after blocking the Democratic priority for a decade. It remains one of several issues Speaker of the House Tim Moore and Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger are expected to negotiate as the legislative session moves toward a weekend close.
The Senate passed its own plan June 2. House Republicans rolled out their proposal last week, and Moore said at the time that he might not bring it to the House floor if he didn’t see a path to final agreement with the Senate.
As he brought that plan to the House floor Tuesday, Moore, R-Cleveland, was cagey on just what those prospects were. “We’re going to pass it and see what happens,” he said shortly before the vote.
During a joint budget press conference later featuring the two leaders, Berger, R-Rockingham, would only commit to reviewing the House bill when it crosses over to the Senate.
“We’re happy with that,” Moore replied. “We’re going to send them a great product.”
Berger responded: “Not as good as what we. …”
Laughter from lawmakers, staff and reporters at the press conference drowned Berger out from there.
The Senate plan pairs expansion with regulatory rollbacks in the health industry, including so-called certificate-of-need rules that limit hospital expansions and industry competition.
Hospitals have pushed back against these proposals for years, and they’re not in the House proposal. During a Tuesday committee meeting on the House version, the heads of the state hospital association, state medical society and the president and chief executive of WakeMed Health & Hospitals were recognized by the speaker and stood in support of the bill.
Hospitals are eager for the billions of dollars in federal funding the measure would unlock, as well as a language in both measures meant to help stabilize rural hospital finances.
The House proposal creates a new joint House-Senate committee on expansion, which would be the second time in a year the legislature has created a committee along these lines. It would also empower Gov. Roy Cooper’s administration to negotiate details of an expansion plan with the federal government.
The bill lays out the House’s expectations on those details and says the administration should bring a full plan back to the new committee in December. That committee would then decide whether to send the plan to the House floor, and the full House would hold a vote in December as well, voting expansion up or down.
In the Senate’s plan, expansion is more immediate. Berger, the top Senate Republican, criticized the House’s plan when Moore announced it last week, saying the state does not need another study committee on this issue.
The Senate’s version of this plan is House Bill 149. The House’s version is Senate Bill 408. The House version appears in what was originally a Senate bill, and the Senate version in what was originally a House bill, because the two sides deleted the other chamber’s original bills and pasted in their language instead.
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