MACPAC Meets, Discusses Medicaid Issues
Members of the non-partisan legislative branch agency that advises Congress, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and the states on Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program matters met in Washington recently to discuss a number of issues.
On the agenda of the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission were the following issues:
- state Medicaid flexibility
- state Medicaid responses to fiscal pressures
- a study requested by Congress on mandatory and 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
- the role of section 1915(b) waivers in Medicaid managed care
Because Pennsylvania safety-net hospitals serve so many Medicaid and CHIP participants, MACPAC’s deliberations are especially important and relevant to them.
Go here for a link to overviews of these issues and the presentations offered at the MACPAC meeting.
The process of determining Medicaid eligibility in Pennsylvania either begins or works its way through the state’s county assistance offices.
Among those steps are ensuring that only providers registered with the state’s Medicaid program can prescribe opioids and fill opioid prescriptions for Medicaid patients; monitoring the opioid-prescribing practices of participating Medicaid providers and taking actions when those practices are inappropriate; introducing new opioid prescribing guidelines; improving access to naloxone to fight opioid overdoses; expanding drug treatment programs; and more.
The Pennsylvania Health Law Project has issued a statement detailing its perspective on the recently proposed American Health Care Act, which would both repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act of 2010.
Among the issues on the agenda of the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission were:
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.
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.