Jeb Bush's Medicaid legacy frets lawmakers: $300 million penalty if Medicaid not privatized

[seafan]

Another one of Jeb Bush's nasty little land mines he left behind.

One of his pet projects was to privatize Medicaid. He pushed two pilot projects onto two large counties with large numbers of Medicaid patients. His buddy and chief of staff, Alan Levine was Jeb's architect of the Medicaid pilot program. After Levine left state government, he was magically offered the job as CEO of North Broward Hospital District, one of Jeb's fiefdoms.


Nice how that worked out for both Jeb and Levine, wasn't it?


Oh, and this new *privatized* Medicaid program forced onto Broward and Duval Counties has been a disaster.


For background:


April 23, 2009:

Florida health officials have negotiated a deadline extension for thousands of Duval County Medicaid patients who learned barely two months ago they needed to find a new health care plan.

Tampa-based WellCare Health Plans Inc. quietly agreed recently to extend the coverage deadline for its larger plan, known as Health Ease, from May 1 to July 1. Health Ease’s more than 34,000 Duval enrollees needed more time to choose new coverage and, in some cases, find new doctors, said Chris Osterlund, the state Agency for Health Care Administration’s assistant deputy secretary for Medicaid.

....

The troubled health insurance company announced it was pulling out of Florida’s Medicaid reform experiment in early February, leaving 78,000 patients in Duval and Broward counties scrambling to find new plans. The blow was especially hard in Duval, where WellCare’s plans represented about half of the Medicaid market share.

The brainchild of then-Gov. Jeb Bush, the reform experiment started transferring Medicaid patients in Duval and Broward into HMO-style plans in 2006 in an effort to trim the program’s hefty budget. Baker, Clay and Nassau counties were later added.

State health officials want to take the pilot statewide if it’s successful. But there is no evidence yet that it is saving the state money. And physicians are bailing on the plan in droves, citing ultra-low reimbursement rates and burdensome paperwork.

.....

The company has been rocked by negative headlines in the last two years. FBI agents raided WellCare’s corporate headquarters in 2007 as part of a Medicaid fraud probe. According to published reports, the company said last year that previous executives overbilled government health programs to the tune of $49 million.

.....

GREAT JOB, Jeb.



Now, for today's news:



Jeb Bush's Medicaid legacy frets lawmakers

Florida must adopt managed-care for Medicaid statewide or could lose federal funding, lawmakers were told.

BY MARC CAPUTO
Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau

May 2, 2009

TALLAHASSEE -- State lawmakers learned this week that former Gov. Jeb Bush's controversial Medicaid reform plan from 2005 includes a time bomb for hospitals: A $300 million penalty.
That's the amount Florida could lose in federal charity health care money if legislators don't reorganize Medicaid statewide within two years. This is about an experimental program designed to shift more Medicaid patients to managed-care plans and make the public health system run more like private companies. It currently operates in Broward County and the Jacksonville area.

The state receives about $1 billion a year from the federal government to reimburse hospitals for charity care. If the state doesn't take managed-care Medicaid statewide by 2011, it would lose $300 million of the money.

Just informed of the penalty, legislative leaders now are scrambling in the waning days of the lawmaking session to pass special budget language that asks the federal government to give the state more time.
They'll also decide whether to bank about $246 million in surplus hospital money. Tampa General Hospital and Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital, which would be hit particularly hard if Medicaid funds are cut, want the state to bank the money so it could help fill the $300 million hole if the state fails to broaden the managed-care program statewide.

Some legislators want to kill Medicaid managed-care entirely.

''We've done the experiment. It has failed,'' said Durell Peaden, the Senate's health care budget chief. ``The reports are unsettling. People couldn't get to specialists, couldn't get adequate care. And they couldn't do it cheaply.''

.....

Former Bush health chief Alan Levine, said the state needs time to make the program work. He said the federal government would likely grant an extension to Florida if it doesn't expand Medicaid managed-care across the state in two years.
''There are things that work in Medicaid reform,'' said Levine, who now heads Louisiana's hospital system. ``There are other issues that will take time to figure out.''

The threat of the $300 million loss in the 2010-11 budget year, however, has added a new dimension to the fight. It renewed a behind-the-scenes battle between private hospitals such as the Hospital Corp. of America and big charity-care hospitals like Jackson Memorial and Tampa General.
The public hospitals want the state to save the surplus money this year in case of a future deficit. The private hospitals would rather see the state give each hospital its current share of the $246 million in surplus Medicaid cash now.

.....

Emulating his brother's wanton destruction, everything Jeb Bush touched in Florida has turned into miserable, toxic waste.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

1. How can it be that this is the first I've heard of this outrage?

How did he get away with something this moronic?

The Bush family is still doing harm, even after they left office.

Imagine if Big Brother Chimpy had gotten his way and privatized Social Security. Imagine what this country would be like right now.

Parasites, these Bushbabies. They need to go underground and stay there...........................

[madfloridian]

2. Thanks for some more of your great research.

:hi:

[Hannah Bell]

3. First the libraries, now this. I swear to god, florida, louisiana & texas are the bushes'

laboratories for the future of the us. k&r.

[SammyWinstonJack]

6. You are exactly right!

I swear to god, florida, louisiana & texas are the bushes' laboratories for the future of the us.

[Joanne98]

4. Isn't there anyway to undo it?

[UTUSN]

5. Why do I suspect Jeb Crow Shrub has a "private Medicaid contract agency"?!1

Like he raked in suitcases of cash somehow from Medicare and his Cuban-Exile partners?!1 The way Neil has an "educational" company. As Poppy said, "My boys have a right to make a living!1"

[Hannah Bell]

7. kicking.

[1776Forever]

8. Georgetown University did a 2 year report on this issue - Here is the link:

videos:

http://www.floridahealthpolicycenter.org/video/medicaid1.html

reports:

http://hpi.georgetown.edu/floridamedicaid/conference.html

...............

I was very involved in this issue when I undertook the journey to get quality care that my 40 year-old son needed after he developed Progressive MS and we found out after he finally received SSI/Medicaid that Florida HMO's (Wellcare) that handle Medicaid in Florida had incompetent Neurologist for the treatment of MS. The "specialists" were not experts in MS but geriatrics, headaches, and children. My son tried to end his life because of the incompetence and it was something that I knew must have affected more then just him. So it took me to contact one of the Wellcare board members to finally get my son a nurse to oversee his case. It was 1 1/2 years after that when we finally found the true Specialist that gave my son the help and care he so urgently needed but they did not come from Wellcare but from the University of Southern Florida Medical Center.

I had started to get my PHD in order to do a report on this issue but I could not continue when my husband, my son's step-father, and I lost our home because of our support for our son that had taken most of our savings in those 2 years. We have since filed bankruptcy. It has been a very rough and rocky road but one that I would go down again to keep my son alive! Jeb Bush and his cronies are just the same as all the other Bushies and Repub's who would say that taking the government out of health care is the answer. My reply to that is these bastards care about nothing and no one but $$$$ signs and how big a pile of gold they can make in their lifetimes!

There is a huge difference in what is paid to the specialists from Medicaid and other insurance payees. There is also a danger of chronically ill person being dropped half way through the year from the restrictions the amount given for care of the chronically ill patient. The main question that I wanted answered was about those people like my son who is chronically ill and needs some fairly expensive medications to have any quality of life experience and their future in this "plan". The plan is supposed to limit those chronically ill patients care.

My proposal was to give the State Medical Centers more monies to help chronically ill patients and set them up to work with local neurologist and other specialists in each State to help set up a health care regiment for each person in order to give chronically ill patients a better quality of life opportunity.

Thank you to everyone that strives for a better health care program in the United States with Single payer Medicaid for all being the best chance for this!

:hi:

:kick: