Medicaid relief for N.C. counties isn’t dead. Forsyth County doesn’t know what to think, but Winston-Salem likes what’s coming out of the Senate Finance Committee:
The plan calls for the state to take over 25 percent of the county’s Medicaid share in October 2007, and 50 percent in July 2008. The state would take on the entire cost in July 2009.
To help pay for it, the state would keep a portion of the sales-tax revenue that counties and cities now get.
City officials said they support the bill because of what it doesn’t have in it.
Under a previous proposal, cities could have faced significant losses in sales-tax revenue, because the state would have capped sales-tax allotments to cities, Mayor Allen Joines said.
The losses for Winston-Salem could have totaled nearly $13 million over the first six years of the previous proposal. But the cap is not in the latest proposal. The version passed by the finance committee would reimburse sales-tax revenues that the city would have gotten otherwise.
“It appears that the city would not be harmed by it. We don’t gain anything, certainly. We just have been trying not to be harmed,” Joines said.
As I wrote last week, my thinking’s changed a bit on this situation, so excuse me if I don’t get real excited about Winston-Salem getting its sales tax revenue.
