Dear Colleague,
As congressional discussions on Medicaid and health reform break for the April recess, we wanted to alert you to some new and newly relevant publications from MACPAC. Among the new and noteworthy topics are:
- How states exercise flexibility in their Medicaid programs including eligibility pathways, benefits, and payment policies. Stay tuned for additional briefs on enrollment processes, cost sharing, and other topics soon.
- The mechanics of setting per capita caps, in particular, the extent to which Medicaid managed care rate setting and the process for establishing budget neutrality limits in Section 1115 demonstration waivers are useful analogues in considering how caps might be set at the national level.
- Key design elements of per capita caps and block grants.
- A detailed look at Medicaid spending over time, compared to other payers, and drivers of growth.
- How states and Medicaid managed care plans are responding to the high costs of specialty drugs.
On hospital payment:
- A new issue brief with results from a first-ever study benchmarking Medicaid payment to other payers such as Medicare. The study reports, among other findings, that base Medicaid payment for inpatient services varies considerably among states but that once supplemental payments are included, Medicaid payment is comparable or higher than Medicare.
- New analysis as part of MACPAC’s required study of Medicaid DSH payments showing that while hospital uncompensated care is dropping nationally—and much more in states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act—safety-net hospitals continue to struggle financially.
In preparation for congressional action on the future of CHIP:
- A new analysis projecting when states will begin to exhaust their federal CHIP funds, an update of projections made in the Commission’s January 2017 Recommendations for the Future of CHIP and Children’s Coverage.
You also might be interested in:
- Our access in brief series. Adults with Medicaid are much more likely to have a usual source of care than uninsured adults and as likely as privately insured patients to have a usual source of care. Nevertheless, patients with Medicaid are more likely to experience other barriers to care than privately insured patients. A separate set of issue briefs contains similar findings for children with Medicaid coverage.
- Compendia of state Medicaid payment policies that detail fee-for-service physician payment policies, state Medicaid policies for Medicare cost sharing, and Medicaid payment policies for outpatient hospital services for every state.
- MACPAC’s newest policy spreadsheet that inventories the functional assessment tools used by each state to determine eligibility and develop care plans for long-term services and supports.
- Downloading a wide array of detailed state-by-state Medicaid and CHIP data in MACStats, MACPAC’s repository of difficult-to-find Medicaid and CHIP statistics and information.
- Following us on Twitter @macpacgov to stay up to date on new publications, data updates, and meeting announcements.
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