Gov. Wolf touts benefits of Medicaid expansion during visit to St. Luke’s Friday afternoon

April 27--In a visit to St. Luke's University Hospital in Allentown Friday afternoon, Gov. Tom Wolf credited the state's Medicaid expansion with helping the Fountain Hill-based health network grow in the past few years.

St. Luke's added thousands of employees in the past year by acquiring Palmerton, Gnaden Huetten and Sacred Heart hospitals, as well as expanding facilities. The network plans to co-build a hospital in Schuylkill County with Geisinger, add a hospital to its Anderson campus in Bethlehem Township and build a hospital outside of Quakertown.

Gov. Tom Wolf visits St. Luke's in Allentown

Gov. Tom Wolf visits St. Luke's in Allentown

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Wolf talked about how his decision to expand Medicaid increased patient volumes and revenue for St. Luke's and other hospitals, and reduced the number of uninsured residents to one of the lowest numbers in the country. The expansion added more than 700,000 residents to the program and helped reduce the state's uninsured rate to under 6 percent, according to the governor's office.

St. Luke's CEO Richard Anderson agreed that adding Pennsylvanians to the Medicaid roles helped boost St. Luke's numbers.

"We saved jobs. We created jobs. And more importantly we helped the people." he said.

Health experts say government programs that provide public and private insurance such as the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid enable people to better manage chronic illnesses, which cuts down on expensive treatments at emergency rooms.

However, hospitals across the state have complained that declining reimbursements from government payers such as Medicaid and Medicare have hurt them financially. Smaller hospitals like Sacred Heart, Palmerton and Gnaden Huetten have joined bigger networks to cope with financial pressures.

At St. Luke's, Wolf argued that Medicaid expansion enabled Sacred Heart and other struggling smaller hospitals to remain open.

"We've been able to keep hospitals that are and were on the financial edge open because now they're getting reimbursed for treatments that they weren't getting reimbursed for before," he said.

Through Medicaid expansion, Sacred Heart increased its number of insured patients, saving the hospitals millions in uncompensated care, said state Rep. Pete Schweyer, D-Lehigh, the former director of community and government affairs for Sacred Heart.

Medicaid, a health insurance program for poor families and the disabled, has become the country's largest insurance program, helping 1 in 5 people.

Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government encouraged states to expand Medicaid to cover people with incomes of up to 138 percent of the poverty line, or $16,642. The push came with a promise of federal funds to cover the full cost until 2016. After that, states had to contribute a gradually increasing portion capped at 10 percent by 2020. Expanding Medicaid was one of the first changes Wolf, a Democrat, made upon taking office in 2015, after his predecessor, Republican Tom Corbett opposed the expansion.

Medicaid is one of the largest expenses in the state budget, amounting to $8.4 billion. The federal government provides a little more than half of the program's overall cost, and state taxpayers the rest.

Wolf, campaigning for re-election, has been pushing back against state Republican legislators' efforts to add a work requirement for those enrolled in Medicaid. Last year, he vetoed a work requirement bill, arguing that it would hurt a vulnerable population.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

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