Pennsylvania Health Law Project Newsletter
The Pennsylvania Health Law Project has published its January 2017 newsletter.
Included in this edition are stories about:
- impending changes in the lineup of managed care providers that serve Medicaid participants in the state’s HealthChoices program for physical health services;
- the status of the state’s implementation of its Community HealthChoices program of managed long-term services and supports for low-income, elderly Pennsylvanians who seek to continue living independently in the community;
- the potential impact of a repeal of the Affordable Care Act on Pennsylvanians; and
- Pennsylvania’s receipt of a Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic demonstration grant from the federal government to improve services and care coordination for individuals on Medicaid or CHIP.
Go here for the latest edition of PA Health Law News.
Patient advocates maintain that all Medicaid beneficiaries with Hepatitis C should have access to the drugs and Pennsylvania’s Medicaid program appears to be on a path toward making that possible.
That includes 680,000 Pennsylvanians who enrolled in the state’s Medicaid program after the reform law allowed for that program’s expansion, more than 400,000 people who signed up for insurance on the federal health insurance exchange, the state’s taxpayers who might be left with the bill for some or all of these costs if the reform law’s financial support were to disappear in the near future, and others.
Beginning on December 1, Medicaid will pay for long-acting contraceptives administered after delivery and also will increase payments to doctors who provide those contraceptives. Currently, those costs are generally borne by hospitals in the lump-sum payment Medicaid makes for deliveries.
Since that time the state’s Medicaid expansion has added 670,000 Pennsylvanians to the ranks of the insured, with others purchasing insurance through the federal health insurance marketplace.