The stopgap program that enrolled tens of thousands of people in temporary Medicaid coverage after the failure of the Massachusetts health insurance website is not going to have a big effect on the state budget, at least not by the Legislature’s reckoning.
The spending plan approved Monday contains about the same for Medicaid as Governor Deval Patrick had proposed in January, before the transitional program started: $13.6 billion. That’s because legislators expect that a trend showing lower use of health care services will provide the leeway to absorb the temporary population.
The budget does, however, require the administration to calculate and report, by the end of July, the financial impact of the Massachusetts Health Connector’s inability to develop a website that meets the terms of the federal Affordable Care Act.
The Connector’s new website, which was supposed to be ready by last Oct. 1, never worked properly and is currently being rebuilt. One of the key functions it could not perform was determining whether individuals are eligible for state or federal subsidies or for Medicaid.
To keep people from losing health insurance, the state allowed people who think they might be eligible for assistance to enroll, temporarily, in Medicaid, or MassHealth, as the program is known in Massachusetts. Enrollees pay no premiums, but the federal government has agreed to reimburse the state for at least half the costs. This temporary program was recently extended through the end of the 2014 calendar year, which is halfway through the 2015 budget year.
By mid-June, 227,000 people had enrolled in temporary coverage, and their claims, by June 5, totaled $90.5 million.
An unknown number of those people are not eligible for MassHealth. If the website had worked, they would be paying at least part of their own premiums, with most of the rest coming from federal subsidies. Instead, the state is paying up to half.
But in fiscal 2014, MassHealth absorbed the added costs without seeking extra money from the Legislature because of lower expenses elsewhere in the program. For the fiscal year that starts Tuesday, the Legislature is counting on the same trend.
Andrew C. Bagley, director of research and public affairs for the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, a business-funded policy organization, said the group remains “a bit concerned” about this approach.
“It strikes me there is going to be some exposure, and it could be significant,” he said.
Felice J. Freyer can be reached at felice.freyer@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @felicejfreyer.