Pa. cuts funding for Phila. program for the disabled homeless, By Alfred Lubrano, August 24, 2012, Philadelphia Inquirer: “The Corbett administration has cut funding for a Philadelphia program nationally lauded as the ‘gold standard’ for helping disabled homeless people get federal benefits. On May 31, the state’s Department of Public Welfare gave Philadelphia’s Homeless Advocacy Project one month’s notice that it was eliminating $722,000 used to help obtain Supplemental Security Income (SSI) money for homeless or near-homeless people who had exceeded their five-year limit for welfare benefits. Many of the people don’t have the mental capacity to work. SSI provides disability income and benefits. The Department of Public Welfare made the cut because the state is ‘reprioritizing’ funding toward programs that emphasize work, DPW spokeswoman Carey Miller said. By taking money from the Homeless Advocacy Project, ‘we will be able to focus better on job placement and retention,’ Miller said…”
Day: August 24, 2012
State Medicaid Programs – New York, Utah
- New York’s model for Medicaid managed care, By Christopher Flavelle, August 23, 2012, Businessweek: “In February officials from the New York State Department of Health summoned senior executives from WellCare Health Plans (WCG) to a private meeting in Albany. Attendance was not optional. For the third straight year, WellCare, which covers 75,000 New York State Medicaid beneficiaries, had just received low marks for the quality of care it was delivering, a scorecard that includes doctor visits for children, diabetes treatment, and cancer screenings. In most large states, that would be unremarkable: Many Medicaid managed-care plans, especially those run by for-profit insurers, report below-average access to medical services with few consequences, according to a study conducted by Bloomberg Government…”
- Utah Medicaid stops paying for hospital errors but data spotty, By Kirsten Stewart, August 23, 2012, Salt Lake Tribune: “Utah’s Medicaid program no longer pays hospitals to treat illnesses and injuries caused by poor care for patients, such as infections, on-site falls and surgeries on the wrong body part. Hospitals have had to report these ‘provider-preventable conditions’ to the Utah Department of Health since July 2011, a requirement of federal health reform. They’ve disclosed 17 to date, most of them infections. But precisely how much taxpayer money was saved isn’t known…”
Poverty and Tropical Diseases
Tropical diseases: The new plague of poverty, By Peter J. Hotez, August 18, 2012, New York Times: “In the United States, 2.8 million children are living in households with incomes of less than $2 per person per day, a benchmark more often applied to developing countries. An additional 20 million Americans live in extreme poverty. In the Gulf Coast states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, poverty rates are near 20 percent. In some of the poorer counties of Texas, where I live, rates often approach 30 percent. In these places, the Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality, ranks as high as in some sub-Saharan African countries. Poverty takes many tolls, but in the United States, one of the most tragic has been its tight link with a group of infections known as the neglected tropical diseases, which we ordinarily think of as confined to developing countries…”