Governors’ Proposal to Cut Medicaid Spending

Medical News Today and the New York Times report that “the National Governors Association and the National Conference of State Legislatureshave drafted proposals that recommend ways for Congress to cut Medicaidspending by $10 billion over the next five years, a move that is calledfor in the fiscal year 2006 budget resolution.”   The governors’ ideas reportedly include:

• Making it more difficult for individuals to transfer assets in order to qualify for Medicaid;
• Increasing the use of “reverse mortgages” to fund long-term care;
• Raising copayments for Medicaid services;
• Providing incentives and penalties to encourage individuals to be more responsible for their own health care;
• Arranging purchasing pools to help small businesses buy health coverage for employees;
• Creating a package of benefits similar to SCHIP for nonelderly, nondisabled Medicaid recipients (CQ HealthBeat, 5/6);
• Enabling states to establish “different benefits packages for different populations or in different parts of the state” (New York Times, 5/9);
• Streamlining the federal Medicaid waiver process or changing the federal statute “to eliminate the need for waivers altogether”;
• Creating a “new national dialogue” for addressing issues related to aging, such as funding for end-of-life care; and
• Usinghealth care tax credits for individuals, employers and state purchasingpools to slow the growth of the Medicaid-eligible population.

Advocates for better health care, the elderly, the disabled, and the poor, not to mention the middle class (who will be hardest hit by some of these proposals), are gearing up for a fight.

I’m wondering:  Will Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell sign off on this document?

Thanks to Eric MacDonald for bringing this story to my attention.