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At the end of December, Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services
Wayne Turnage came to D.C. councilmembers with an emergency. The District’s Medicaid contract, which, at $1.5 billion, is among the largest that the D.C. government hands out, was in trouble.
Turnage lobbied councilmembers on emergency legislation that would essentially sidestep a Contract Appeals Board ruling on the District’s violation of procurement law and create an exemption for MedStar, one of the three companies chosen to manage health care for Medicaid beneficiaries. The goal, he says, was to avoid yanking 67,000 of the most “medically fragile” residents from one health insurance plan to another twice in one year.