448 Georgia officials say they’re still working toward a July 1 launch of the waiver plan to add more people to the state’s Medicaid program,.
Georgia officials say they’re still working toward a July 1 launch of the waiver plan to add more people to the state’s Medicaid program, despite a harsh initial assessment by the Biden administration.
The conflict with the feds involves the eligibility requirements that Georgia proposed and that the Trump administration approved. President Joe Biden, who took office in January, and his fellow Democrats have sharply different views on Medicaid than do former President Donald Trump and many Republicans.
447 The state’s Medicaid agency is setting up plans for a health insurer bidding competition that will award a new multibillion-dollar medical contract. “We’ll be.
The state’s Medicaid agency is setting up plans for a health insurer bidding competition that will award a new multibillion-dollar medical contract.
“We’ll be looking for the best bang for the buck,’’ Frank Berry, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Community Health (DCH), said last week at an agency board meeting.
Berry
The current Medicaid insurers are being paid a total of about $4 billion a year for delivering medical services to more than 1 million members.
By the end of March, nearly 80 percent of Georgia facilities had gone for at least 18 months without these comprehensive inspections, said the investigation report by CNHI, a newspaper company.
Georgia’s backlog surpassed those of every other state, exceeding the 76 percent in Maryland and Oregon, and easily topping the national average of 51 percent. The CNHI data follow similar findings on Georgia inspections by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last fall.
Inspection delays didn’t escape the attention of lawmakers. The fiscal year 2022 budget contains more than $12 million to beef up the inspection workforce and conduct more timely reviews of nursing homes.
More than $7 million of that funding is “to help reduce staff turnover and increase staffing to reduce the backlog of the surveys’’ within the Georgia Department of Community Health, state Rep. Terry England, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, told GHN last week. The rest will pay for contract workers