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North Carolina counties got a welcome bit of help from the North Carolina General Assembly, when the legislative body included a plan to take on the burden of Medicaid costs in its next budget.
In rural counties such as Warren and Halifax, Medicaid was eating up 10 percent, or more, of local budgets, and was a cost factor over which the county governments had no control.
Now, with the General Assembly’s new plan, the state will take on the cost in a three-year phase in plan.
“This is going to mean a great deal to the counties … over the next three years,” said District 49 Rep. Lucy Allen, whose district includes all or parts of Halifax, Franklin, and Nash counties. “It will mean they will be relieved of a (federal) mandate that they cannot control -– which will total $500 million or more statewide when fully implemented, will free up local dollars for education, recreation, emergency management, or “other things that are important to the citizens of the counties.”
Warren County Manager Linda Jones, who has been campaigning for Medicaid relief since she took office, was glad to hear the news.
“They (the state) will assume $323,000 of our Medicaid cost this year,” she said.
Of course, the state will now have to cough up nearly half a billion dollars, once the plan is fully in place, to take on the extra expense.
Allen said there is a complicated formula that shows how each county will experience Medicaid relief, and she said a good deal of that extra expense will be funded through what the state expects is additional tax revenue as the economy continues to grow.
Jones, however, said most counties will have to give up some funding in other areas.
“This year, we will give up $117,000 ADM school money,” she said. ADM, or average daily membership, is money the state supplies to each locality for education, based on the number of students enrolled each year.
To ensure Warren County will not experience a drop in other state funding that would cancel out the Medicaid savings, Jones said the state had also agreed to give Warren County a one-time payment of $269,000 in sales tax revenue in March.
“No county will see less than $500,000 in Medicaid relief in the first year” of the phase-in, she said. “That is a good deal for Warren County.”
In the present budget, Medicaid expenses for the county is set at $1.97 million, or about 7.5 percent of Warren County’s $26 million budget. But, Jones said, there’s really no way to adequately project what the total cost might be, so seeing the state take over the cost is potentially an even bigger relief for the county than the budgeted figures show.
Medicaid has been an even bigger burden on Halifax County, costing the county around $5 million a year, County Manager Matthew Delk said earlier this year.
Attempts to reach Delk for comment on the General Assembly’s Medicaid relief measure were not successful.
Rep. Michael Wray, who represents the counties of Warren, Northampton, and Vance in District 27, has also been a supporter of Medicaid relief. He was out of town and not available for comment.
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