Wisconsin will be receiving $365 million to offset the state health care deficit and forestall teacher layoffs following the passage of federal legislation last month.
The Education Jobs and Medicaid Assistance Act provides $10 billion to states to save or create primary and secondary education jobs for the 2010-2011 school year, $179 million of which will be heading Wisconsin’s way to rehire teachers and expand education jobs in the state. The funding is intended to forestall increased job loss.
“States would be forced to make cuts where we can least afford them. These cuts would be catastrophic and I’m proud to have helped prevent them,” Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., said in a statement.
Gov. Jim Doyle completed the certification to receive Wisconsin’s education jobs fund allotment Aug. 19, in an effort to begin disbursing money as soon as possible to rehire and expand the teacher workforce.
The Madison Metropolitan school district is slotted to receive $8,377,542.
The bill is expected to create and save a total of 319,000 jobs, about 3,000 of which will be created in Wisconsin, according to Department of Education estimates.
Nearly one-third of those jobs are expected to be created in Milwaukee, Cudahy, South Milwaukee, St. Francis and West Milwaukee, regions where education funds have been hit harder by the recession than Madison.
“There weren’t that many layoffs in the spring, so the layoffs were not a huge issue like they were in Milwaukee. We only had a handful,” Joe Quick, a spokesperson for the Madison school district, said.
Nevertheless, the Madison superintendent will be advising a plan to present to the school board by October on how the stimulus money will be used to create jobs in Madison, Quick said.
The Medicaid stimulus funding portion of the bill will go toward reducing the $850 million deficit in Wisconsin’s budget for BadgerCare Plus and other Medicaid programs that provide health care for the poor, disabled and elderly, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.
The federal stimulus act temporarily increased the federal Medicaid matching assistance program to help states deal with health care deficits and was set to expire in 2010, but the provision in the new bill extends the matching period another six months.
“Without this funding Wisconsin would have faced significant job losses in the private health care industry,” Doyle said in a statement.
Wisconsin would have been facing $647 million in Medicaid cuts, according to the governor’s office.
The bill was financed by budget spending cuts, including reducing food stamps funding and closing a tax loophole multinational corporations have used to ship jobs overseas.
Wisconsin also applied in June to permanently extend a 2003 Medicaid waiver program for birth control by raising the qualifying limit for single women from $21,600 to $32,490.
Previous funding for Medicaid birth control was conditional, and Wisconsin had received a three- year extension, but the application has not been approved yet, said Stephanie Marquis, communications director for the Wisconsin Department of Revenue.
If the state amendment plan that was submitted is approved, the new higher-threshold birth control waiver will be funded by the federal stimulus money Wisconsin is receiving, Marquis added.
Correction: The original copy stated Stephanie Marquis is the communications director for Medicaid in Wisconsin. She is now the communications director for the Wisconsin Department of Revenue. We regret the error.
