Scott Walker to delay moving residents from Medicaid to federal health exchange

Responding to the troubled rollout of Obamacare, Gov. Scott Walker said Thursday he would delay for three months his plan to move more than 70,000 state residents out of state health coverage and into an online federal insurance market.

At a Capitol news conference, the Republican governor said he would call lawmakers in for a special legislative session in early December to pass the change and keep those 77,500 patients from losing their state BadgerCare Plus coverage in January before the federal insurance program is ready to accept them.

Walker said he wouldn’t take any additional federal Medicaid money to keep the recipients on BadgerCare and instead would pay for the extra cost by delaying the roughly similar cost of adding a new group of more than 80,000 slightly poor adults to the state program.