2025 Legislative Session

Medicaid Expansion in 2025!

It’s not too early to gear up for the 2025 Legislative Session. One of the largest healthcare initiatives is removing the sunset for Medicaid Expansion. Medicaid was expanded in 2017 after a long-fought battle for the ability to provide healthcare services to the needy in Montana. To date, Montana has seen tremendous economic benefit from expanding Medicaid.

See two recent objective report here:

What Losing Medicaid Expansion Could Mean for Montana

 https://mthcf.org/resource/medicaid-in-montana-2023/.

You can also review the county Medicaid impact reports from the Montana Budget and Policy Center Montana’s Medicaid Keeps Counties Healthy | Montana Budget & Policy Center

It’s imperative that we remove the sunset for Medicaid Expansion and make it the way we do business in Montana.

We have two main reasons for wanting to remove the sunset:

1. As of 2025, those aged over 65 will be the largest demographic in Montana. To be able to continue our economic growth in Montana, we will need all hands on deck for the workforce. That includes adults who need Medicaid expansion to be treated for ongoing mental health issues or substance use disorders.
   
   Here are some talking points for that issue:

• 76% of Montana’s adult Medicaid enrollees aged 19-64 reported working full time, working part time, or attending school.
• In 2021, more than 61,000 expansion enrollees utilized preventive services, more than 34,000 received mental health services, and more than 5,500 received substance use disorder treatment.
• Medicaid expansion generated state budget savings of more than $27 million in SFY 2022 by providing higher match rates for some existing Medicaid populations and by replacing existing state spending with new federal dollars.
• Uncompensated care costs for Montana’s Critical Access Hospitals declined by 35% between 2016 and 2021 with no rural hospitals closing during that time.

2. Montana has a large number of children in the welfare system and foster care. Although we have made gains in reducing those numbers, there are still a large number of children that must seek treatment outside of Montana until we can reopen the treatment houses/beds that were closed during COVID.

• Over 50% of the children removed from homes for neglect, have one or more parent with a substance use disorder or mental health issue. If we want to have those children returned as soon as possible to their families, we need to ensure that Medicaid Expansion is available to treat the adults and return those children to healthy families.
• Creating healthy families and lives for children, creates a future generation of healthy Montanans to ensure the long-term stability of our communities and state.