— After months on the defensive in the debate over whether to expand Medicaid in Missouri, state Republicans are hoping to reclaim the debate this summer with a new word: Transformation.

While Republicans fully opposed flat expansion as called for by Gov. Jay Nixon in the 2013 session, the party is looking to seek in 2014 new Medicaid reforms, while all the while accepting some of the federal funds available to the state by the 2010 federal health care law.

Speaking to reporters in Jefferson City on Thursday, House Speaker Tim Jones announced an interim committee and a citizens working group to mull ways to do just that. The House Interim Committee on Medicaid Transformation (which compliments the similarly named Senate committee) will be chaired by State Rep. Jay Barnes, a Jefferson City Republican who focused on the issue during the 2013 session.

“We believe a better goal is to reform and transform our system of Medicaid so that it serves as a true safety net by providing our most vulnerable citizens with quality care,” Jones said in a statement. “It is a goal that cannot be accomplished simply by blindly throwing more money at a broken program.”

Barnes’s committee will be complimented by a “working group” of citizens and lawmakers led by Rep. Noel Torpey, R-Indepdence, Jones announced.

A study commissioned by the University of Missouri and the Missouri Hospital Association claims that some 300,000 Missourians could be covered if the state expands Medicaid to those at 134 percent of the federal poverty level. Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government would pay for 100 percent of expansion in 2014 for three years, before gradually shifting to 90 percent by 2020 — shifting the burden of the other 10 percent to the states.

Nixon made Medicaid expansion the chief priority of the first legislative session of his second term. Nixon participated in dozens of public events touting expansion as the “smart thing to do” economically and the “right thing to do” morally. Some 200 business groups — including the Missouri Chamber of Commerce (not always a friend of policy proposals championed by Democrats) joined the cause.

In addition to the business groups, a handful of Republican campaign consultants joined the cause — touting expansion as the right thing to do politically, too.

The committee, one of nearly a dozen interim committees created by Jones, will begin meeting this summer throughout the state.