Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Medicaid Rolls Exploding : States CAN Reform System

The biggest stumbling block to fixing the Medicaid rolls is the political will to actually do the heavy lifting, even in the face of attacks from those that are benefiting from the fraud, mostly democrats who have for decades used the fear of this welfare benefit being reduces or eliminated by Republicans. 

If a state like Illinois can get it done that is dominated by liberal democrats, the rest of the states that are inundated but illegal individuals should be a walk in the park.

A Simple Way States Can Cut Their Medicaid Rolls
Source: Merrill Matthews, "How Two States Cut Medicaid and Saved Money," Institute for Policy Innovation, November 17, 2014.

November 24, 2014

There's a simple way to reduce Medicaid spending, says Merrill Matthews, resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation. Just by reevaluating who was on their state's welfare rolls, Illinois and Pennsylvania were able to remove hundreds of thousands of people from their Medicaid programs, saving taxpayers a great deal of money.

Illinois had a Medicaid funding shortfall of $2.7 billion in 2013, and it was struggling to keep its program funded. So, lawmakers passed the SMART Act, which created a "redetermination" program -- a program that would reevaluate whether the people on the state's Medicaid rolls were still eligible. Matthews explains that after examining 1.3 million Medicaid case files covering 2.7 million people, the state removed 234,000 people from its Medicaid rolls in February 2014. Since then, the state has continued its redetermination program, having removed 173,469 people from the program between February and September. There were 8,000 dead people on the state's rolls, in addition to people who no longer qualified for the program for various reasons.

Pennsylvania embarked upon a similar initiative to tackle Medicaid and other welfare programs. After a year and a half, the state had removed 220,000 people from its welfare programs, resulting in a savings of $710 million.

Cleaning up Medicaid rolls is especially important today, as the program is growing rapidly, with enrollment having increased 15 percent since October 2013. Matthews explains that states that expanded their Medicaid programs are seeing even higher growth, and 10 states have seen growth of 30 percent.

 

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