Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Bids To Manage Montana's Medicaid Expansion Higher Than State Expected
The cost of hiring a private company to manage Montana’s Medicaid expansion could be a few million dollars a year – or it could be a lot more. Four health-insurance firms bid on the contract to manage the expansion of Medicaid, which will provide health coverage for thousands of poor Montanans. Every bid has proposed costs higher than originally estimated by the Bullock administration. For example, if 25,000 people sign up for coverage under the program next year, Oregon-based PacificSource would charge the state as much as $12 million to manage the expansion – and perhaps a one-time technology fee of $632,000. (Dennison, 9/14)
The scheduled closure of the hospital in the southeast Kansas community of Independence could create new urgency around the Medicaid expansion debate. Advocates of expanding the Kansas Medicaid program — known as KanCare — say the additional federal money it would generate would help stabilize a growing number of struggling hospitals in the state and might have helped save Mercy Hospital Independence. They point to estimates produced by the Kansas Hospital Association that showed expansion would have generated an additional $1.6 million in annual revenue for Mercy. (McLean, 9/14)
Legislators are expected to get the official word on Tuesday that in the midst of the good news that Florida will have a surplus of $635 million in revenue, the cost of providing health care to the poor and uninsured continues to soar. Next year, the cost of Medicaid will rise by $600 million as more people become eligible for the program and the federal government steers the state $400 million less in Low Income Pool money than it received this year to reimburse hospitals for charity care. In anticipation that hospitals will be blamed for many of those rising costs, the Safety Net Alliance Hospital Alliance of Florida issued a statement Monday explaining that the state's chronic underfunding of Medicaid and federal requirements governing reimbursement rates for Medicaid HMOs are the reasons for the growth in the Medicaid budget -- not hospitals. (Klas, 9/14)
