Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Mo. Senate Panel Cuts $28 Million From Medicaid Budget
[Missouri] State senators have trimmed about $28 million of Medicaid spending from a mid-year increase to Missouri鈥檚 budget. The Senate appropriations committee on Tuesday lowered the planned funding boosts for Medicaid鈥檚 hospital care, medicine and physician services. Most of the nearly $500 million supplemental budget would still go to health care for people with low incomes. (4/11)
Legislators voted Monday to allow the state to move toward outsourcing case management work in a Medicaid program for people with acquired brain injuries, four months after rejecting a similar proposal. (Levin Becker, 4/11)
State officials called a news conference when they inked a $188 million contract in the summer of 2011 for a new high-tech Medicaid enrollment system with Accenture, a Dublin-based multinational professional services giant. They said the new Kansas Eligibility Enforcement System, or KEES, would replace a clunky paper-based enrollment system that sometimes took up to 45 days. The new system, they said, would allow Kansans who provided the correct information through an online portal to enroll within a day or two. That hasn鈥檛 happened. (Marso, 4/11)
A preliminary injunction blocking the state from cutting off Medicaid payments for Planned Parenthood services obtained by three women who are challenging the cutoff in a lawsuit shouldn't be applied to anyone else, the Arkansas attorney general's office argued Monday. The state attorneys argued that there is no proof that a class represented by the three women would be "irreparably harmed" by waiting for a resolution of the suit. They also argued that the court lacks jurisdiction to expand the injunction while it is on appeal to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis. (Satter, 4/12)