Pull full article from the Floirda CHAIN website:
Greg Mellowe, has an expansive post explaining the extension of Florida’s Medicaid Reform Experiment. Although the posting is broader than just senior issues, to is one of the clearest statements of the current Medicaid Reform. A few of the points raised in the agreement between CMS and the State of Florida are below.
* Obtain federal approval for any type of expansion of Medicaid managed care beyond the five Pilot counties. Florida has such a request pending at this time.
* Spend at least 85% of taxpayer-funded Medicaid payments on direct patient care or direct care quality improvement activities.
* Set a well-defined minimum standard for plans to provide Medicaid benefits that meet the needs of at least 98.5% of enrollees. Plans may not reduce benefit levels below this minimum standard.
* Prevent disruptions in patient care, particularly those caused by plans in the past. Florida must take steps to prevent plans from pulling out of any geographic area. The State must also use a detailed procedure to ensure continuity of care for patients when they’re forced to change plans.
* Hold managed care plans more accountable to ensure access to and quality of care.
Florida:
– must set, justify, and enforce standards for plans, including standards for provider network adequacy and access to care.
– must ensure that the patient-level “encounter data” that has been promised for more than five years is collected, analyzed, and used to monitor health care access and quality.
– must receive federal approval of any process used to select and negotiate with managed care plans as well as plan contract documents.
* Allow most recipients who do not have a choice of at least two managed care plans to enroll in the MediPass program (or regular fee-for-service Medicaid).
* Improve its choice counseling efforts, not reduce them. Florida must not only continue its choice counseling activities to help patients make informed choices, the State must also perform activities that were supposed to have been doing since 2006, including increasing health literacy and reducing minority health disparities through outreach. Choice counseling must also use a plan rating system.
* Apply the same rules for determining eligibility and requiring co-payments in any Medicaid managed care experiment that apply elsewhere in Medicaid. The State cannot use the flexibility of the Medicaid waiver to jack up co-pays, demand payment of premiums, or restrict who can qualify for Medicaid. In other words, the State cannot use the waiver to evade the basic protections of Medicaid.