As states continue to struggle with budget woes, they are getting more aggressive, and more ambitious, about finding ways to cut their health care costs – and they aren’t waiting for health care reform to kick in to get started.

Oregon, for example, hopes to introduce a new series of community health centers that would provide more integrated care to their patients.  At first the centers would serve only Medicaid and dually eligible (Medicare and Medicaid) patients, but eventually, state officials hope the clinics will serve public employees and teachers and possibly small businesses as well.  Read about Oregon’s plans in this Stateline report.

Massachusetts is focusing its attention on a narrower group:  chronically ill dual eligibles.  The state hopes to move 115,000 such individuals from its Medicaid fee-for-service program to managed care plans.  Learn more about Massachusetts’s plans in this Wall Street Journal article.

With the federal government encouraging states to find new ways to serve their dual-eligible populations and the federal government, through the Affordable Care Act-created Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) providing seed money for such innovation, more states can be expected to begin testing new approaches to serving this population in the…

States are likely to make greater use of managed care in their Medicaid programs as implementation of the Affordable Care Act continues.

Health care reform will add approximately 16 million people to the Medicaid rolls in 2014, and states will be eager to do everything they can to keep their Medicaid costs as low as possible.  One tool they are likely to turn to is managed care, which enables them to pass along some of the financial risk to the private sector.  In the article “Medicaid managed care is a growing but risky business,” the Washington Post describes the expansion of Medicaid managed care in Texas and looks at the prospect for further use of Medicaid managed care in other states both now and in the future.