MACPAC Meets, Discusses Medicaid, CHIP Issues
The non-partisan legislative branch agency that advises Congress, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and the states on a variety of Medicaid and State Children’s Health Insurance Program issues met last week in Washington, D.C.
Among the issues on the agenda of the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission were:
- the flexibility of states in structuring and administering their Medicaid and CHIP programs
- state Medicaid responses to fiscal pressures
- studies requested by Congress on mandatory/optional benefits and populations
- current Medicaid parallels to per capita financing options
- illustrations of state-level effects of per capita cap design elements
- high-cost hepatitis C drugs in Medicaid
- the role of section 1915(b) waivers in Medicaid managed care
Because Pennsylvania safety-net hospitals serve so many low-income Medicaid and CHIP beneficiaries, MACPAC’s deliberations are often very important to them.
Go here, to the MACPAC web site, for links to documents on all of these subjects.
The reason: for the second time, companies that lost a public bidding process protested the state’s choices. The first time, the state threw out all the bids and started over again. This time the state says it needs more time to deal with the protests, negotiate new contracts, and get the new contractors up and running.
Included in this edition are stories about:
The Kaiser Family Foundation has just created a new tool that enables users to compare and contrast all of the current repeal and replace proposals: you pick the proposals you want to compare and you select the aspects of those proposals that interest you.
In a new report, the Pennsylvania Health Funders Collaborative attempts to answer that question, offering projections on the impact of the 2010 health reform’s repeal on jobs, prescription drug coverage for seniors, insurance status for low-income Pennsylvanians, hospitals, and the state’s economy as a whole.
With policy-makers in Washington considering some changes, and possibly major changes, in the state/federal Medicaid partnership, the Health Affairs Blog has taken a look at some of the options those policy-makers might consider.
If the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, is repealed and not replaced, over a million Pennsylvanians could lose access to health care and tens of thousands of people – people who are our friends, our neighbors, and our family members that are currently receiving treatment for a substance use disorder – would lose insurance coverage and no longer be able to afford their treatment.