Medicaid under review

• By MARSHA SHULER
• Advocate Capitol News Bureau
• Published: Jun 29, 2009 - Page: 1A

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Private health-care providers who treat Louisiana’s poor are facing a $180 million cut in the government health insurance program that pays them.

The amount is far less than originally expected. But the cut’s impact will be hard to measure until the state Department of Health and Hospitals drafts new rules.

“We are trying to figure out what this does or doesn’t do,” Louisiana Hospital Association president John Matessino said of the situation. “People keep wanting me to give them a percentage they are going to be cut.”

But Matessino said he won’t know until DHH comes up with new rules that would tell how much private providers would be paid for the care they render to Medicaid patients.

Some private health-care providers worry that the cuts could result in private physicians leaving the Medicaid program and hospitals reducing services and laying off employees.

The budget for the Medicaid program that pays private providers – hospitals, physicians, pharmacists and others – is expected to be $4.25 billion for the fiscal year, which begins Wednesday.

It had been $4.43 billion.

But those calculations are based on an initial review of what happened on the last day of the session.

Legislators scrambled in the final hours of the legislative session and found about $26 million in state money that they hope could bring in another $200 million or so in federal funding.

Medicaid is the government insurance program that provides medical care to the lower income and some elderly, roughly one out of four Louisiana residents.

Shortly after the state’s budget crisis became clear, DHH issued emergency rules that would employ 7 percent cuts in the original budget proposal for the reimbursement rates of private providers.

DHH Secretary Alan Levine said he has sent his agency’s fiscal staff back to the drawing board to develop new rules detailing the size cuts required to stay within the dollars provided.

“I’m going to try to target these reductions in a way that preserves access” to primary care, Levine said.