Oregon Public Broadcasting

Washington state is preparing to cut 40,000 people off state-funded healthcare. The legislature ordered the cuts.

Health care experts grappled with whom to drop and whom to insure at a meeting in Olympia Wednesday. Correspondent Austin Jenkins reports.

Slashing Washington’s Basic Health Plan by 42-percent is a complex exercise.

For instance you can’t simply kick-off all the healthy people and keep the sick ones. That would mess up the insurance pool. So Washington’s Health Care Authority is considering a number of options.

The obvious: move people who are eligible to Medicaid. Then there are the more controversial ideas: set up a lottery system to determine who keeps coverage. Or force people off who’ve been on the program a long time.

That last idea could backfire warned Karen Merrikin with Group Health – especially when it comes to people with chronic illnesses.

Karen Merrikin: “And one of the worst things you can do from a health outcomes perspective is either have people turn on and off of the program or to have disenrollment just as you’re getting your chronic illness under better management and control.”

The Health Care Authority expects to decide by June 20th how to make the cuts.