Â鶹ŮÓÅ

The Obama administration is dialing up the pressure on a handful of states that have resisted expanding Medicaid coverage for their low-income residents under the federal health care overhaul. The leverage comes from a little-known federal fund that helps states and hospitals recoup some of the cost of caring for uninsured patients. The administration says states can just expand Medicaid, as the health care law provides, and then they wouldn't need as much extra help with costs for the uninsured. (Kennedy, 4/24)

House and Senate leaders weren’t backing off their opposing positions on Medicaid expansion Friday during tense budget negotiations leading into the final week of the Legislative session. But they did manage to find enough common ground to jump-start negotiations early in the day, only to watch them grind to a halt by evening. (4/26)

Gov. Tom Wolf's administration plans to begin transferring more than a million adult Medicaid enrollees into a single, new benefits program that it touts as a more efficient and effective way of providing health care for the poor, disabled and elderly. The Department of Human Services will start moving more than 100,000 people Monday into the program, called Health Choices. It also will stop admitting new enrollees into plans that had been created by Wolf's predecessor, Tom Corbett, as part of Pennsylvania's expansion of Medicaid's income eligibility guidelines under the 2010 federal health care law. (Levy, 4/24)

A new analysis highlights that it is often cheaper for people to pay ObamaCare’s penalty for not having health insurance than to buy coverage, meaning the penalty might be too low to spur middle-income people to get covered. The analysis from the consulting firm Avalere Health finds that for people making less than 200 percent of the poverty line, or about $23,000, purchasing insurance is usually cheaper because of income-based subsidies under the law. (Sullivan, 4/24)