This story additionally ran on NPR. This story might be republished totally free (details).
The Trump administration Monday launched a Medicaid “scorecard” supposed to point out how the nation’s largest well being program is performing. But the nation’s high Medicaid official didn’t need to draw any conclusions.
“This is about bringing a level of transparency and accountability to the Medicaid program that we have never had before,” mentioned Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Yet in a gathering with reporters, Verma refused to debate the findings in any element or touch upon any particular person states that carried out poorly or exceptionally.
“I will let you look at the data and make your own conclusions,” she instructed journalists a couple of minutes earlier than the report was posted on-line.
When reporters pressed Verma to touch upon the doc, she refused to offer an evaluation of the Medicaid program, the federal-state well being program for low-income residents. She has run Medicaid for the previous 15 months.
“The idea here is to give you a sense of where states are on different areas,” she mentioned. “The idea is to be used for best practices,” and it’s “an opportunity for us to identify” and have discussions with states that aren’t performing properly.
Medicaid covers about 75 million individuals, about half of them youngsters.
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The report checked out how properly states present all kinds of well being companies to youngsters and adults. It additionally reviewed how rapidly the federal authorities was approving state waiver requests to vary their packages.
But not all states offered information for every service as a result of sharing data was voluntary.
For instance, half the states didn’t present how properly they management Medicaid enrollees’ blood pressure.
The National Association of Medicaid Directors panned the scorecard. It acknowledged the necessity for a system to measure efficiency however mentioned its members have considerations about its accuracy and usefulness.
“There are significant methodological issues with the underlying data, including completeness, timeliness, and quality,” the affiliation mentioned in a press release. It famous that many of the information comes from 2015.
As anticipated, the info confirmed nice variation in how states present care, together with immunizing youngsters or getting dental care to youngsters. A giant cause is that state Medicaid advantages and funds to docs differ dramatically, the Medicaid administrators mentioned, in order that “it will not be possible to make apples-to-apples comparisons between states.”
In her first public speech, Verma promised final November to launch a Medicaid scorecard. She mentioned states gained’t instantly face any penalties for poor efficiency — however that would change.
“The data … begins to offer taxpayers insights into how their dollars are being spent and the impact those dollars have on health outcomes,” Verma mentioned Monday.
Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of well being legislation and coverage at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who beforehand led a congressional advisory board on Medicaid, recommended that the knowledge continues to be too incomplete to be of nice worth.
“It is amazing to me that in 2018 this is all we have when trying to understand how the nation’s largest insurer performs for its poorest and most vulnerable residents,” she mentioned.
This story additionally ran on NPR. This story might be republished totally free (details).
KHN’s protection of youngsters’s well being care points is supported partly by the Heising-Simons Foundation.
Phil Galewitz: [email protected]”>[email protected], @philgalewitz
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