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State Health Watch Archives – March 1, 2011

March 1, 2011

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  • Is dropping out of Medicaid a serious consideration for states?

    Charles Duarte, administrator of Nevada's Division of Health Care Financing and Policy, says that in January 2010, state Gov. Jim Gibbons asked staff members to explore whether the state could drop out of the Medicaid program.
  • DC Medicaid revamps its fraud detection processes

    Did a dentist extract the same patient's tooth twice, or extract teeth the year after they gave the patient upper and lower dentures? These are obvious red flags for fraud, while other types of fraud are less easy to identify, says Ann Page, RN, MPH, director of Health Care Accountability Administration for Washington, DC, Medicaid.
  • Battles will continue, over both Medicaid expansion and the mandate

    The argument of some state policymakers, says Michael Sparer, PhD, JD, department chair and professor of health policy and management at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health in New York City, is that the federal government is significantly increasing its oversight of the Medicaid program and its demands on state Medicaid officials; "and they believe strongly that that's the wrong way to go."
  • Medicaid offering participant-directed long-term care services

    To date, 240 programs with more than 800,000 participants offering participant-directed services as a delivery option in long-term care services have been located by the research team of Kevin J. Mahoney, a faculty member at the Boston College Graduate School of Social Work and director of the National Resource Center for Participant-Directed Services in Boston
  • Patients becoming more involved with care of chronic conditions

    Forty-six states are actively building delivery and distribution systems to ensure that programs in chronic disease self-management are readily available to individuals with chronic conditions, especially older adults, says Sue Lachenmayr, MPH, program associate at the Center for Healthy Aging in Washington, DC.
  • Surprisingly, many young uninsured are risk-adverse

    Many young and healthy uninsured individuals don't see themselves as invincible and in fact are risk-averse, according to a December 2010 study by the Washington, DC-based Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC).
  • Medicaid programs making headway with medical homes

    Over the past year, eight states Alabama, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia have been working with the National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP) to develop medical home programs in their Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Programs.
  • MassHealth's bundled payment approach: A "baby step" toward broader reform

    An innovative pilot program in Massachusetts will soon be implemented, with the goal of improving the care of children with asthma, reports David Polakoff, MD, chief medical officer of MassHealth, the Massachusetts Medicaid program. "We hope to implement this as soon as possible," he says. "This is an idea that has been kicking around for awhile; it has been tried in some small-scale pilots."