The new federal Medicare-Medicaid Coordination Office has released a presentation in which it shares information about its mission, goals, programs, and plans.
The agency was create by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to foster a more focused approach to the challenge of better serving the dual-eligible population.
Download the new office’s presentation here.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has awarded $728 million in grants to help expand and improve community health centers that primarily serve low-income Americans.
The funding came through the Affordable Care Act.
Many of these community health centers expect a significant new influx of patients when Medicaid rolls expand and health insurance becomes more affordable to low-income families in 2014.
Read more about the new federal funding, where it will go, and how it will be used in this Kaiser Health News report.
The federal government needs to do a better job of verifying that hospitals and other providers are meeting the criteria to qualify for special Medicare and Medicaid funding available through the electronic health record program created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
This is one the conclusions reached by the U.S. Government Accountability Office(GAO) in a recently released report titled First Year of CMS’s Incentive Programs Shows Opportunities to Improve Processes to Verify Providers Met Requirements.
To improve verification, GAO recommends that Medicare evaluate its current approach to auditing provider eligibility; conduct more verifications; collect additional information from providers when they attest to their eligibility for the funding; and give the states the option of having the federal government collect eligibility data for state Medicaid electronic health record funding.
Read a more detailed summary of the GAO report and download the entire report here, on the GAO web site.
Medicaid will increase its matching rate for states that offer qualified services in the home or community for dual eligible recipients who might otherwise require nursing home or other institutional care.
The Community First Choice program, created under the Affordable Care Act, will increase the federal Medicaid matching rate by six percentage points for home- and community-based services that meet specific federal criteria.
Find a Department of Health and Human Services news release and fact sheet with further information about the new program here.
Enrollment is playing a greater role than health care inflation in the rise of federal health care spending, according to a new study by the Urban Institute.
“Medicare, Medicaid and the Deficit Debate” notes that the rise in annual health care costs is now tracking closer to rising gross domestic product (GDP) than it has in the past and that the combination of growing numbers of baby boomers newly eligible for Medicare and increasing Medicaid enrollment spurred by the weak economy are more central to rising federal health care spending than health care inflation.
Read a summary of “Medicare, Medicaid and the Deficit Debate” and download the complete report here, on the Urban Institute’s web site.