States and Medicaid Program Costs

Posted on October 12, 2010 by townsend

• Mental health providers grapple with Medicaid expansion, By Darryl Fears, October 12, 2010, Washington Post: “For District health officials, it was an easy decision. The federal government handed them an opportunity to save $56 million over four years by expanding Medicaid this summer and they jumped at it. They switched 35,000 low-income residents from the city -funded D.C. Health Care Alliance insurance plan to a Medicaid plan and reaped the reward. It looked like a win-win: The city got some financial relief and the new Medicaid beneficiaries got mental health coverage, which was not part of the Alliance plan. But it creates a problem for the city’s mental health-care providers, who said this week that they are faced with serving thousands of new clients they are not prepared to manage…”
• Medicaid among Wisconsin’s fastest-rising costs, By Jason Stein and Patrick Marley, October 11, 2010, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “In hospital birthing rooms across Wisconsin in 2008, state health programs covered 45% of all deliveries. That’s just one example of the breadth of the state’s health care safety net, which has grown even larger in recent years. Today, more than 1.1 million people in Wisconsin depend on Medicaid health programs for the poor. Medicaid provides health care for one in five Wisconsin residents; the group of programs has expanded faster here over the past nine years than in any state except Arizona. That has placed health care among the state’s fastest-rising costs for taxpayers. ‘States do have few easy and good options left to control spending in the program,’ said Robin Rudowitz, associate director with the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, who has written about nationwide increases in Medicaid amid the downturn. To keep up, the state Department of Health Services is requesting $675 million more for Medicaid and other programs over the next two years, a huge part of the more than $3 billion shortfall in the two-year state budget that awaits the next governor…”
• Tennessee’s bold leap in care for the aged and disabled, By Christine Vestal, October 12, 2010, Stateline.org: “After lagging behind the rest of the country for years, Tennessee is catching up fast when it comes to changes in its health care system aimed at elderly and disabled residents. More of them are getting the assistance they need in their homes – at a much lower cost than at a nursing home. A lot of this change is the direct result of efforts by Governor Phil Bredesen. Nearing the end of his eight years in office (he is required to leave due to term limits this year), Bredesen decided to focus on getting Tennessee off the bottom rung in rankings of states that offer consumers choices in long-term care. Just a few years earlier, only a few hundred Tennesseans were able to get Medicaid funding for anything but a nursing home. Now, it is one of a handful of bellwether states that offer a broad range of alternatives to nursing home care…”