- Medicaid plan draws fire, By Marsha Shuler, Baton Rouge Advocate: “A state health agency proposal to scale back rates paid to Medicaid providers drew opposition Monday from nursing home and hospital interests. State Department of Health and Hospitals Undersecretary Charles Castille said reducing the rates to the levels they were three years ago would lower spending by $232 million. The program grew $1 billion in one year and now costs more than $6 billion. State Treasurer John Kennedy, the chairman of a Commission on Streamlining Government advisory group, said cutting the budget across the board, such as this one, is not the way to go. Kennedy asked DHH officials to instead consider prioritizing spending for Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor…”
- Analysis: Missouri finally produces Medicaid report, By David A. Lieb (AP), St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “After claiming for more than a year that it could not do so, the Missouri Department of Social Services finally has obeyed a state law and published a list of employers whose workers get government-funded Medicaid health care coverage. Yet compliance with the Medicaid reporting law may be only an experiment. Although the list is supposed to be published quarterly, the department says there’s no telling when it will produce the report again. As lawmakers in Washington, D.C., debate a national health-care overhaul, Missouri’s experience shows how slow and difficult it can be for bureaucracies to implement even incremental changes in the health care system. Missouri was one of several states to mandate employer-Medicaid reports in recent years as a way to gauge the extent to which government was picking up the slack for businesses that either didn’t offer their employees affordable health insurance or paid them so little that they qualified for Medicaid…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty