PA Senate to Take Up Medicaid Work Requirement
Undeterred by past defeats, members of PA’s state senate are again attempting to advance Medicaid work requirement legislation.
This time, the proposal to impose a Medicaid work requirement will add new flexibility to such a requirement, offering exemptions for individuals deemed “medically frail” and enabling individuals who do volunteer work, attend college, or who are actively looking for work to continue qualifying for Medicaid benefits.
The proposal will be considered by the Senate Health and Human Services Committee.
The legislature has passed two Medicaid work requirement bills in the past but Governor Tom Wolf has vetoed them.
Learn more about this latest effort to establish a Medicaid work requirement in Pennsylvania in the PA Post article “Wolf, Republicans resume tug-of-war over Medicaid work requirements.”
As envisioned by the state, the current program, in which individual counties contract independently with transportation providers to serve their residents on Medicaid, was to be replaced by a regional approach in which the state contracts with three vendors to serve all of Pennsylvania. Objections by members of the state legislature and county officials, however, led to legislation that requires the Department of Human Services, Department of Transportation, and Department of Aging to study the implications of such a change for patients and taxpayers and to report their preliminary findings to the legislature in September.
The report, published on the JAMA Network Open, found that ER visits by uninsured patients fell from 16 percent to eight percent between 2006 and 2016, with most of this decline after 2014, while uninsured discharges fell from six percent to four percent.
Included in this edition are articles about:
According to Kaiser, for-profit companies that sub-contract with Medicaid managed care organizations to review requests for services often deny care to Medicaid patients to save money for the MCOs that employ them and to benefit themselves financially.
An early November bulletin from CMS, however, clarifies that this approach is still permissible, which is good news for Pennsylvania safety-net hospitals and SNAP members hoping to benefit from the state’s hospital assessment.
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf has vetoed a bill that included a requirement that certain Medicaid recipients either work or search for work.
Among the issues addressed in the letter are how the House-passed proposal would detract from the role of Medicaid in fighting the state’s opioid crisis; the proposed reduction in tax credits to help purchase health insurance; the challenge posed by a per capita approach to Medicaid financing; the potential loss of health care jobs; the likelihood of large numbers of Pennsylvanians losing their health insurance and state Medicaid costs rising significantly; and the erosion of consumer protections.