Some Medicaid mothers must wait weeks, months before first doctor’s visit, By Anna Claire Vollers, May 8, 2017, AL.com: “When Katie Silvia learned she was pregnant in November 2016, her first call wasn’t to her obstetrician – it was to the Alabama Medicaid office. Her husband had received a letter from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama that his insurance, a Blue Cross plan purchased through the health exchange, was not going to cover her pregnancy because their income level qualified her for pregnancy Medicaid. But according to doctors and patients, Alabama’s complex maternity Medicaid process can mean some moms don’t get their first OBGYN appointment until they’re well into their second trimester, 13 or more weeks into their pregnancies…”
Tag: Alabama
State Medicaid Programs – Kansas, Alabama
- Disability group calling for federal investigation of Medicaid backlog, By Gabriella Dunn, July 12, 2016, Wichita Eagle: “A state disability organization is calling on the federal government to investigate the state’s handling of the application backlog for Medicaid. And this week, the Kansas Legislative Division of Post Audit will begin an investigation into the backlog issue. The backlog was caused in part by the state switching its computer system that processes Medicaid applications about a year ago. And then in January, it switched the agency that oversees the applications, furthering the problem…”
- Alabama’s Medicaid crisis: Four ways out, By Brian Lyman, July 15, 2016, Montgomery Advertiser: “Legislators don’t lack options to address a shortfall in the state’s Medicaid program. But what they do lack — for now — is leadership in the Alabama House and a certainty about whether the will exists among legislators to reopen the General Fund budget…”
Local Minimum Wage Laws
When a state balks at a city’s minimum wage, By Alan Blinder, February 21, 2016, New York Times: “Veronica Roscoe, who earns $7.75 an hour working at a Burger King here, thought last August that she had won: This city had become the first in the South to approve a local minimum wage. “It was, ‘Wow, victory,’ “ Ms. Roscoe, 55, said. “I was running around the job, acting a fool.” But that was before the Alabama Legislature met, and before a showdown between state lawmakers and city leaders about who should have the authority to set wage policy in Birmingham. The dispute is a particularly ferocious version of a divide playing out nationally as cities increasingly move to raise their minimum wages and some states, particularly those controlled by Republicans, try to restrict their ability to set floors on pay…”