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Columbus
Dispatch...
Managing Medicaid
Single agency should allow better coordination of giant health program
Monday, August 6, 2012
Gov. John Kasich’s plan to create a separate cabinet-level department
to handle all of Ohio’s Medicaid work is a good idea.
No single state program spends more money than Medicaid, and no public
service is growing in cost and complexity like health care, yet
responsibility for the spending of more than $18 billion annually in
state and federal Medicaid dollars long has been spread among six
different state agencies.
The Department of Job and Family Services, traditionally the welfare
department, handles the lion’s share. But five other agencies, dealing
with disability, mental health, aging, addiction and health, also
handle Medicaid-funded programs.
Aside from its 388 Medicaid employees, Job and Family Services has
3,280 people working in programs dealing with public assistance, child
protection, work-force development and unemployment compensation, with
a combined budget of $3.6 billion. Separating the Medicaid monster
should allow the agency to better focus on those programs.
The Office of Health Transformation, which Kasich created to coordinate
with all state health-related programs, already has made significant
improvements in streamlining government health-care programs. It has
changed contracts with managed-care providers to build in incentives
for keeping costs down and patients healthier, by encouraging better
preventive and follow-up care, and has asked the federal government for
permission to extend those managed-care principles to the neediest
patients — those eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare, the
health-insurance program for the elderly.
But creating a single agency with authority over all Medicaid spending
should allow greater efficiency...
Read the rest of the article at Columbus Dispatch
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