Gov. John Kasich's administration announced Friday that Ohio's Medicaid program, the federally supported health care system for the poor, will soon become its own free-standing, cabinet-level state agency.
Medicaid — which at a cost $18.8 billion in 2012, including $6.4 billion in state funds — is the state's largest expense. The bulk of the Medicaid program is currently housed under the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, but at least four other state agencies also have some role in administering services, which has made the entire system clunky and inefficient, state officials have said.
The decision to separately house the single largest state spending program under its own state agency is long overdue, officials said. Such a move had been recommended by bipartisan state study commissions in 2005 and 2006 but never acted upon.
Reforming Medicaid has been a primary focus of the Republican governor since he took office in 2011. Making this system a standalone state agency, as so many other states have long since done, was an early goal of the administration.
"This is a change that is overdue," said Greg Moody, director of the Governor's Office of Health Transformation. "Gov. Kasich believes it is time to act and time for Medicaid beneficiaries and Ohio taxpayers to begin seeing the improvements that this transformation will provide."
Medicaid currently serves 2.2 million Ohioans and will remain the state's largest single expense for the foreseeable future. And those numbers figure to climb as the new federal health care rules under the Affordable Care Act are gradually implemented.
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