No Money For Florida

Recommend reading an interesting article entitled “ Medicaid Bonuses to Reward States for Insuring More Children,” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/health/policy/27medicaid.html?partner=rss&emc=rss reporting that the Obama administration plans to announce Monday that it will make $206 million in bonus Medicaid payments to 15 states — with more than a fourth of the total going to Alabama — for signing up children who are eligible for public health insurance but had previously failed to enroll.
This program was created to address the following issues:

* To enroll an estimated 4.7 million children who would be eligible for subsidized coverage if their families could be found and alerted. Two of every three uninsured children are thought to meet the income criteria for government insurance programs.
* The stubbornness of the problem is one reason the government expects millions of people to remain uninsured even after 2014, when the new health care law requires most Americans to have coverage and vastly expands government programs to make it affordable.

Alabama will receive a $55 million bonus, more than twice as much as any other state, for having 133,000 more children on its Medicaid rolls than projected by a formulated base line. The 15 states that will receive bonuses reported a total of 874,347 children above the baseline, which factors in population growth and, to some degree, demand driven by the economy.

Alabama, for example, has adopted “express lane eligibility” so that Medicaid application processors can use income findings from other safety net programs to validate eligibility.

Because of the formula’s requirements, none of the money will go to California, Texas or Florida, which account for nearly 40 percent of all uninsured children. States like Florida make enrollment cumbersome and devote minimal resources to marketing. Many of my patients have never heard about the program and I try assisting them to navigate poorly designed web sites and to complete forms they do not understand (neither do I.)

Shouldn't it be the goal of our new governor-elect to increase the enrollment for children qualifying for this program? Unfortunately, those children may have to wait for a long time because ideological purity comes first!

Who will pay the price? All of us, because those children will grow into sick adults requiring more expensive care to “correct” mistakes that could have been prevented in childhood.