President Obama signed approval to send $16.1 billion in Medicaid relief to states, in addition to an additional $10 billion in other relief funding for states.  The legislation, passed by the House mere hours before Obama signed it, will extend the increase in the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) through June 2011.  The House passed the bill by a vote of 247-161.

The Federal Medical Assistance Percentage is the additional amount that the federal government has been paying into Medicaid in order to help individual states recover from the effects of the recent economic downturn.  For the past year, the government has been paying 6.2 percent more than its share of Medicaid funding, and the extension of the federal payments will phase it out over the next two quarters – to 3.2 percent in the first quarter and 1.5 percent in the second.

This extension is in addition to the $159.1 million in grants that the Obama administration allocated within the new health-care overhaul legislation towards programs that train nurses and geriatric care specialists, as reported on by The Washington Post.