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News Item: Utah seeks to cap costs, sign-ups in limited Medicaid plan

Utah and other Republican states are proposing to cut costs in the state’s Medicaid plan to cover the poor by requiring some participants to have jobs and limiting them to five years of coverage.

The state has also proposed capping the number of people covered by the program at 25,000 and stopping their coverage after five years. Officials also want to require a $25 copay for emergency-room visits that aren’t true emergencies.

Micah Vorwaller, a policy analyst with the Utah Health Policy Project, a nonprofit advocacy group promoting affordable health care, said a lifetime limit can be a problem for the homeless and the poor because it can sometimes take people longer than five years to get back on their feet.