Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
N.C.'s Compromise Spending Plan Includes Medicaid Reforms
Legislative leaders on Monday unveiled details of their compromise $21.7 billion spending plan for the 2015-16 budget year 鈥 76 days after it was due. The state budget resolves conflicts between the House and the Senate over education funding, Medicaid reform and sales tax distribution, and House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger both expressed confidence at getting the budget passed and signed into law by a Friday deadline. ... The budget includes $225 million over two years to reform the Medicaid program. Cost overruns in Medicaid, which provides health coverage for more than 1 million poor and disabled North Carolinians, have been a budget problem for years, but the House and the Senate have long disagreed on how to move Medicaid from a fee-for-service system into more of a managed care operation. (Leslie, Binker and Burns, 9/14)
Members of the health care community who have been waiting for months, actually years, for a final deal on the long-anticipated overhaul of North Carolina鈥檚 Medicaid program will have to wait a few days longer. That鈥檚 because language on Medicaid reform is not in the final state budget, but in a separate bill that will be made public later this week or early next. (Hoban, 9/15)
The budget spends $225 million over two years to transform Medicaid from the system where the state pays for every doctor鈥檚 visit and procedure to a per-person payment. Although details on how the money would be spent were not available Monday afternoon, Sen. Louis Pate, a Mount Olive Republican, said the money would be used to 鈥渟tand up the new entity and keep the existing entity going.鈥 A separate bill that would transform the Medicaid program calls for statewide commercial Medicaid managed care companies to operate alongside regional Medicaid health plans offered by hospitals and providers. The state now contracts with Community Care of North Carolina, networks of doctors, to manage Medicaid patients鈥 care. The budget would allow CCNC to continue to operate until 2017, Pate said. (Campbell, 9/14)
