Baker wants Graham-Cassidy bill defeated
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Gov. Charlie Baker is opposed to the Graham-Cassidy Bill.
Passage of the Graham-Cassidy health care reform bill in Congress would force Massachusetts to either "dramatically step back" from its decades-long commitment to expanding coverage or find huge sums of new revenue or money within the budget to keep programming going, Gov. Charlie Baker said Thursday.
Baker, a Republican, has joined many Democrats in advocating for the defeat of the Graham-Cassidy bill that Republican Senate leaders plan to put on the floor for a vote next week.
"There's no question that this would cost the commonwealth a tremendous amount of money in the short-term, probably somewhere between four and six hundred million dollars annually and even more in the out years when you get out to sort of 2025 when I think it would be more than a billion dollars a year,” Baker said during a WGBH interview.
A study done by Avalere Health released on Wednesday estimated that the Medicaid shift under Graham-Cassidy from an open-ended, income-based entitlement program to one with block grants to states would cost Massachusetts $8 billion between 2020 and 2026.
Baker said if the bill were to pass he anticipates having a year to figure out next steps, including a possible retreat from decades of bipartisan work to expand coverage, before the federal funding starts to dry up.
"This would require us to either take a big step back from that or we would have to go find a new way to fund literally hundreds of million of dollars in lost federal revenue," Baker said.
Asked by host Jim Braude whether President Donald Trump was correct when he Tweeted that Graham-Cassidy would protect coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, Baker paused.
"This thing's gone through so many changes, that's a really hard question to answer as I sit here right now. Certainly, earlier versions of it did not,” Baker finally said.
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