Big Sky Times

An outline of Montana’s Medicaid expansion program is being sent to the federal government for reauthorization with the hope that nearly 90,000 residents continue to receive health care coverage.

Since 2016, the state’s Medicaid expansion program has helped thousands of low-income adults.

“We’ve clearly seen that the number of uninsured have dropped dramatically in the state of Montana,” Rich Rasmussen, president and CEO of the Montana Hospital Association, told the Big Sky Times. “These people have coverage. They’re getting care early in their illness and they have access to services that they had not had before.”

He explained that Medicaid expansion has significantly facilitated health service delivery, in particular, breast cancer screening. During the state’s 2016-2019 Medicaid expansion program period, 9,505 women received screenings resulting in 142 diagnoses.

“Breast cancer screening is off the charts in terms of the number of folks that have been able to access this care,” he said.  

In that same time frame, more than 3,000 cases of colon cancer were identified or averted out of 8,368 screenings performed.

“Prior to expansion, these were folks that didn’t have access to that,” Rasmussen said.

He also mentioned the Medicaid expansion program is a key factor in the early detection of diabetes, allowing patients to begin managing the disease and greatly reducing medical intervention. The increase in diabetes diagnosis was 23 percent higher than before the state Medicaid expansion program was initiated.

Substance use is another area the program has successfully addressed, Rasmussen said. Since 2016, there have been 9,332 outpatient visits in relation to the Montana Medicaid population and 2,591 have received residential service.

Economically, the program has been a boon to Montana businesses, especially in productivity, where it decreases the number of workdays a Medicaid-enrolled employee will miss, Rasmussen said.

“So we know that 3 out of 5 businesses in Montana have somebody on Medicaid expansion,” he said. “And these are small businesses that otherwise may not have the ability to provide health insurance coverage. But Medicaid expansion gives them the ability for their employees to have that.”

He further reported that Medicaid expansion added $600 million to Montana’s GDP and created more than 9,000 jobs. Additionally, the Montana Department of Labor and the University of Montana report that 18,000 state businesses had workers with Montana Medicaid coverage and 98 percent of businesses with 50-plus employees had at least one person enrolled in the program.

“We know that if we spend a dollar on…Medicaid expansion, we know that that dollar will be respent throughout the economy,” he said. “And so when that dollar is respent for every job that we create we’re creating 1.6 more jobs.”

The positive effects on the state’s job market have been profound. The health care positions generated from the state Medicaid expansion program have exceeded the entire mineral and forestry jobs in Montana, Rasmussen said.  

“That’s a very powerful number because we look at what has historically been an engine in our state of the mining industry and the forestry industry,” he said. “Expansion alone has created more jobs than the total number of jobs that exist in those two industries.”

Seemingly, the absence of the state’s Medicaid expansion program would be far-reaching. Rasmussen said it has demonstrated its value and effectiveness.

“We are addressing chronic conditions that we weren’t able to do before and we’re addressing conditions that certainly have an impact on one’s life, their employment status and the community,” he said.