By Michael Tomsic
September 25, 2015
Medicaid is always one of the biggest expenditures for states, and North Carolina is overhauling its program to try to make its budget more predictable. The overhaul is essentially a mixture of health care models that are gaining national prominence. The result will change who’s in charge of keeping low-income patients healthy and how North Carolina pays for it.
Many North Carolina lawmakers consider Medicaid the budget Pac-Man that eats up all the money they could spend on other priorities.
That’s a big reason Republicans in control of the legislature passed the overhaul.
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Also, lawmakers set a cap of 12 percent for how much money can go toward administrative costs and profits. Here’s some perspective from Joan Alker of the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families:
“The challenge lies in the fact that Medicaid is already a very lean program, and there’s just not a lot of fat to cut out there,” Alker says. “The concern is: will the managed care company save money the right way or the wrong way?”
Read more here.
