- McCrory plan would open state’s Medicaid business to private companies, By Lynn Bonner, April 4, 2013, News & Observer: “Gov. Pat McCrory wants to overhaul the state’s Medicaid program by having managed care companies offer health care plans for poor, elderly and disabled people. The overhaul, unveiled by administration officials Wednesday, would diminish the role of a nationally recognized nonprofit agency while opening the state’s Medicaid business to private companies that now provide such services in more than half the states in the country. McCrory said Wednesday that the change would benefit health care providers and the state by bringing predictability to Medicaid expenses, which the state has trouble estimating from year to year…”
- States saying ‘no’ to Medicaid expansion, but low-income citizens, patients worried, By Halimah Abdullah, April 5, 2013, CNN: “Bettina Cox battled cervical cancer in 2012. A year later, the Texas native feels that narrowly qualifying for a Medicaid-sponsored program for low-income and uninsured female cancer patients saved her life. She now wants her governor and state legislature to support an expansion of Medicaid — part of President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act — that she feels could save the lives of thousands of other women in her state by helping them detect diseases much earlier. But if Texas lawmakers have their way — as well as governors and legislatures in Florida, South Carolina and nearly a dozen other states — low-income Americans like Cox may not have expanded access to funds needed for such procedures. Those states feel the expansion is an unnecessary government overreach at a time when spending should be limited, not expanded…”
Tag: Privatization
Medicaid Expansion and Health Insurers
Medicaid insurers gear up for profit, By Phil Galewitz, March 8, 2013, USA Today: “After his back injury kept him out of work last year, Sergio Mera enrolled his family in Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for the poor. These days when they need a doctor, the Meras travel less than a mile from their home to a new clinic. ‘They take good care of you,’ says Mera, 37, as he sits in an exam room with his wife and two kids. The clinic, affiliated with Molina Healthcare, one of the nation’s largest Medicaid managed-care plans, is one of about a dozen facilities the company is opening across the country to handle a wave of new customers in 2014. That’s when about 10 million more people are expected to sign up for Medicaid managed care under the Affordable Care Act, and as states shift enrollees into private plans, according to trade group Medicaid Health Plans of America…”
Anti-Poverty Programs – Kansas
- Poverty in Kansas: Some fear rules cast poor families adrift, By Eric Adler, January 5, 2013, Kansas City Star: “A crescent moon hangs in a clear sky above Deer Creek Village. It is a flat and treeless expanse of 92 townhouses where poor families with bedsheets as curtains live side by side in low-rent duplexes subsidized by the federal government. Some have a saying here: One way in, one way out. It is meant to describe the single road, Colonial Drive, shaped like a Q, that encircles the homes. Residents figure it was designed to make it easy for police to come in and hard for drug dealers to escape. Families here also know it refers to their lives and futures. One way in: Poverty. One way out: Jobs and education. These days, the notion occupying many who advocate for Kansas’ poor is that less than three miles away, near the Capitol dome, government officials led by Gov. Sam Brownback are making ‘getting out,’ rising out of poverty, all the more difficult…”
- Kansas’ privatization, limit of welfare orgs worries advocates, Associated Press, January 6, 2013, Topeka Capital-Journal: “Advocates for the poorest Kansas residents say Gov. Sam Brownback’s administration is making it tougher for the state’s needy to rise out of poverty by cutting much-needed assistance. Brownback administrators, however, insist that stricter policies on who receives state assistance are forcing people to find jobs instead of relying on handouts. Ever since Brownback campaigned for governor in 2010, the conservative Republican has declared that lifting children out of poverty is a priority. But advocates for the poor argue that under Brownback’s administration needy residents are being cast adrift and that the coming years will be even worse, The Kansas City Star reported…”