Are you flippable, Wyoming?

by Wyoming Liberty Group Staff

Some progressive outlets are targeting Wyoming as a state that could be flipped to support Democratic causes such as expanding Medicaid coverage to able-bodied adults. Do you want to support their efforts, or do you want to keep Wyoming healthcare privately controlled? The Wyoming legislature is considering Senate File 146, a bill that would allocate $260,000 in funding and add a government employee to study Medicaid expansion. It should be noted that expansion has been thoroughly examined in the past, both on a national level and even by our own Wyoming Department of Health.

We should also consider the fact that the original sponsor of SF 146 was unaware of an identical study conducted by the Wyoming Department of Health (DoH) last year. Perhaps that is the reason that the proposed study failed to acknowledge the study put out by the Department of Health. Typically when someone conducts a study, they build off of previous ones to draw a more nuanced conclusion. That was not the case with SF 146.

Instead, the sponsor of the bill want to conduct a redundant study that would glean zero original insights into the issue of expansion. The bill seeks to gain a better understanding of what a potential expansion population would look like in Wyoming, but we already have those numbers at our disposal. In their report, the DoH predicted the high, low, and median enrollment projections for the state. The range is from 10,000 adults to 42,000 adults, with 27,000 being the understood middle ground for expansion.

Not only does the DoH provide an accurate prediction for who would enroll in expanded Medicaid coverage, they also attached a price tag for the state. In their report, the DoH predicated that the expanded Medicaid population would cost the state $33 million every two years, which reflects the Wyoming Liberty Group's predicted $17 million price tag per year.

Of course, that is using the predicted numbers, and other state's experiences with expansion have shown us that the predicted numbers are often dramatically lower than the actual enrollment and cost associated with expansion. The real-world numbers for expansion are concerning, to say the least.

I want to now address the bold prediction made by a branch of the progressive healthcare movement, Flippable.org. On their website, they specifically targeted Wyoming as a state to "flip" blue, and cited us not expanding Medicaid as the chief reason for flipping the state. Specifically, Flippable made the claim that we are leaving 163,000 Wyomingites in the coverage gap by not expanding Medicaid.

Flippable makes a critical mistake in predicting who would sign up for expanded Medicaid coverage because they chose to look at the total number of uninsured Wyoming residents, instead of looking at the number of uninsured residents making 138% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) or lower. This latter group is the one we should think of when we talk about Medicaid expansion.

Even when they use the wrong number though, Flippable still does not get it correct. The real number of uninsured Wyomingites is only sitting at 65,000 individuals, not the 163,000 people Flippable said were uninsured in Wyoming. We should ask ourselves why progressives would continue to promulgate a lie when the majority of evidence points to contrary results. The answer is that certain progressives would choose to only use sources and statistics that support their agenda of expanding Medicaid, regardless of the truth.

If you believe that Wyomingites should make decisions on the basis of truth and logic, then you cannot support allocating more funding to a redundant study, and you should not believe the myths surrounding Medicaid expansion in our state. Instead, I would advise you to look at our analysis on expansion, along with the findings of the DoH, and decide for yourselves whether or not we want to expand coverage to able-bodied, working-age adults.