BadgerCare Proponents Call For Walker To Change Budget Provisions

A coalition of health care reform advocates is calling on Governor Scott Walker to remove items from his proposed budget.

Specifically, it wants him to remove provisions that raise premiums and change income eligibility standards for children in the BadgerCare program.

According to a report released by the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families, the changes could potentially knock 29,000 children off of the state’s subsidized health care program for low-income families. None of the changes would take effect this year, and all of them would need federal approval before they could be implemented. Research director Jon Peacock says lawmakers aren’t paying attention to these changes.

“They need to be taken much more seriously, because these are very important changes that at some future date are really going to complicate the administration of the programs and reduce coverage for a whole lot of families”

For example, one of the proposed changes expands the definition of “family income” to include all the wage earners in a household – even if they are not related and regardless of their eligibility for BadgerCare under the federal poverty guidelines. Peacock says that doesn’t make sense under the federal Affordable Care Act.

“If you are going to count their income, you should count them as part of the family size as well. It’s totally unfair to count their income only and not the additional cost that they bring to the household.”

But a spokeswoman for the state Department of Health Services says the changes are needed to align BadgerCare more closely to the private health care insurance market, and despite the fact they can’t be implemented now the department wants the flexibility to do so when and if federal approval comes.