INDIANAPOLIS —Indiana’s Senate Republicans nixed a major voucher school expansion in favor of increased Medicaid funding under their latest state budget proposal released Thursday.
That’s a significant shift from the House GOP spending plan, which sought to allocate $1.1 billion in fiscal years 2024 and 2025 to expand eligibility for the Choice Scholarship program.
The new voucher dollars accounted for roughly a third of the $2 billion in new, additional state funds that House Republicans wanted to earmark for K-12 education.
But Senate budget writers opted to keep the Choice program as-is, meaning vouchers will stay limited to Hoosier families that make less than 300% of free and reduced lunch eligibility, equal to about $154,000 annually for a family of four.
“Medicaid is now outpacing K-12,” said Sen. Ryan Mishler, R-Mishawaka, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee. “(Medicaid) has already grown at a rapid pace. Everybody wanted to expand it more in their bills. And this is the thing that scares me the most .. we have to figure something out.”
Compared to the House plan, the Senate budget decreases overall K-12 funding by 2% — instead putting those dollars towards a $2 billion biennial increase in Medicaid funding. Spending on the healthcare assistance program would total $7.5 billion in the budget, overall.
Mishler said the Senate GOP plan also commits the same as the House budget — $225 million — for public-private partnerships meant to increase public health services across the state. That’s still only two-thirds of Gov. Eric Holcomb’s ask for the statewide program, and less than half what the Governor’s Public Health Commission originally suggested, however.
The two-year budget spends $43.3 billion overall and ends the biennium with $3.2 billion in reserves.
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