North Carolina House rejects Senate plans on two key issues
RALEIGH (WTVD) -- 50 days and counting. As of Wednesday, that's how long lawmakers have been in Raleigh after the original state budget ran out.
They've passed two "Continuing Resolutions," funding government through the end of this month but they have major hurdles ahead of them.
The most obvious is the state budget. To speed that up, lawmakers took other sticking points out of the budget to be debated separately.
So far, that hasn't worked.
Wednesday, the House voted down a Senate plan to redistribute sales tax and unanimously rejected the Senate's plan on Medicaid. Now, lawmakers will work to resolve their differences on both behind closed doors.
Where, in other years when the legislative session has run long, lawmakers focused on the budget, this year, they seem committed to also passing Medicaid reform.
"This is one of the most important issues we're taking up this session," said Sen. Ralph Hise from Madison County. "We don't plan to be done with this session before this is complete."
The Senate wants to move Medicaid out of the Department of Health and Human Services and create a separate, stand-alone Department of Medicaid. The House wants the division to stay under DHHS.
Former DHHS Secretary Lanier Cansler, a Republican, sides with the House.
"Every division that's in that department relates to the other one way or another," said Cansler.
"Medicaid impacts those divisions, those divisions impact Medicaid. And so there has to be some sort of coordination. Once you move it outside of DHHS, now you've got two entities and the question is, who's going to make sure that coordination happens?"
That's not a worry for senators who support the plan to move it out of the agency. They're more concerned about cost overruns and management.
"You've seen more than issues than we can count with budget overruns because they're not accountable to their budget," said Hise. "Whatever Medicaid spends is what it spends."
House Speaker Tim Moore was optimistic about the two sides working out a deal on Medicaid. "I think the plans are more similar than they are different," said Moore.
But when it comes to whether to leave it in the Department of Health and Human Services, Cansler says there's no middle ground. "There isn't a compromise on that. It either is or it isn't."
