By Joe Touschner Like many states, Utah has been working to redesign its Medicaid program in an effort to contain costs–the state submitted a Section 1115 demonstration waiver application to CMS earlier this month. As my colleague Joan Alker has blogged about in the past, waivers are often adopted with little public transparency even though […]
Governor Rick Scott has now officially set in motion an ill-advised transformation of Florida’s Medicaid program that will place the health care of most Florida Medicaid beneficiaries into the hands of for-profit companies. The new law expands a managed care pilot program operating in five counties under a Section 1115 federal waiver. In moving ahead […]
Proponents of block granting Medicaid have been pointing to Rhode Island’s Section 1115 research and demonstration waiver that includes a global cap on federal spending as evidence of the success of this approach. But as an article that appears in yesterday’s New York Times underscores, this analogy is just another example of the “fact free” […]
Last week the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services sent a letter to the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration in response to the state’s request for waiver authority to expand managed care statewide. CMS responded by saying that their Medicaid waiver extension request cannot be granted because it lacks a specific plan. The state’s […]
A working group consisting of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Georgetown CCF, Families USA, and NHelp, with input from the National Women’s Law Center, NCQA and SEIU have produced comments on the proposed Section 1332 State Innovation waiver public process regulations issued by CMS on March 14, 2011. Take a look at the […]
Today 34 national groups sent a letter to Secretary Sibelius asking her to finalize the Section 1115 Medicaid and CHIP public process waiver regulations as soon as possible. As the letter notes, state Medicaid waiver activity is a hot topic these days. The Secretary and her colleagues at the U.S. Department of Health and Human […]
