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With full federal funding for expanding Medicaid set to expire at the end this year, President Barack Obama is proposing to indefinitely extend the health law provision for any of the 19 states that have not yet adopted the enhanced eligibility. But Obama would need the Republican-controlled Congress to approve the offer. That appears unlikely considering Congress voted last week to repeal the Affordable Care Act, though the GOP critics did not muster enough support to override the president’s veto. Obama will seek congressional approval for extending the three years of full federal funding in his 2017 fiscal year budget proposal, which is scheduled to be released Feb. 9. (Galewitz, 1/14)

President Barack Obama will offer a financial incentive in his fiscal 2017 budget proposal to 19 state governments that passed up an earlier offer to help pay to expand Medicaid coverage to more low-income residents, the White House said on Thursday. Obama's new proposal would give states more time to opt in, and would pay for the expansion for three years, the White House said in a release. (Rampton, 1/14)

President Obama plans to propose giving new states that expand Medicaid coverage to the poorest of the poor more time before they have to chip in to cover the new recipients, the White House said in a blog post early Thursday. Obama's fiscal 2017 federal budget will include a legislative proposal to provide any state that expands Medicaid with the same three years of full federal funding and same phase down as the states that expanded the program in 2014. (O'Donnell, 1/14)

White House officials said President Barack Obama will ask Congress to include three years of full federal funding of expansion for any state that extends eligibility for the program to most low-income residents. "This common-sense proposal makes the expansion as good a deal for states that expand now as it is for the states that have already done so," wrote Shaun Donovan, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, and Cecilia Muñoz, assistant to the president and Director of the Domestic Policy Council. (Radnofsky, 1/14)

Providing this additional assistance would probably be expensive. The White House did not provide a cost estimate. It also would require congressional approval, which is likely to be difficult, given persistent GOP antipathy to the health law. Congressional Republicans this month passed legislation, which Obama vetoed, that would have repealed large sections of the law, including the Medicaid expansion. (Levey, 1/13)