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State Panel Today Will Weigh Plan to Reform Medicaid

Posted on: Wednesday, 14 December 2005, 15:00 CST

By Virginia Young, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Dec. 14--JEFFERSON CITY -- Disabled people who work could keep their state-paid health insurance under a plan that will be debated today by the Medicaid Reform Commission.

However, under proposal, they wouldn't qualify if they worked as little as one hour a month, as they had under an old program.

The proposal is one of the recommendations in a 71-page report aimed at revamping Medicaid to place more emphasis on prevention, wellness and personal responsibility. The Medicaid Reform Commission will consider the plan today and Thursday. The results will go to legislative leaders by January.

Senate Majority Leader Charlie Shields, R-St. Joseph, drafted the report and is chairman of the commission. He said the plan incorporates ideas discussed during six months of public hearings and work sessions.

"We tried to find the areas of consensus that we could move forward on," Shields said. "I want people to understand this notion of paying for health and not disease."

For example, the report says the state should create a "culture of health" by educating low-income patients about the cost of care and rewarding them for healthy choices. Technology can play a key role, the report says, by making health data more accessible.

Medicaid is a state-federal program that covers the elderly, people with disabilities and some low-income families with children.

Annual increases in the program's costs have outstripped the growth in state revenue, prompting Gov. Matt Blunt and legislators to call for an overhaul.

Under a bill passed last spring, the current program is to end by 2008. The commission's recommendations are supposed to serve as the basis for a new program.

Shields left out some controversial ideas, such as requiring low-income dads to pay part of the hospital birth costs. He said that idea could be proposed in legislation but was not in the report in an attempt to pick up bipartisan support.

"It was a lightning rod," he said. "My hope is we'll get a report that we'll have all 10 voting members ready to sign."

The recommendation on the working disabled is one of the most specific proposals in the report. The new program would replace one scrapped by the Legislature this year.

The old program covered disabled people with incomes up to 2 1/2 times the poverty rate -- $1,940 a month. A survey found that people on the program got most of their income from disability checks, not earned income. Some who said they were working did chores, such as baby-sitting a relative or walking a neighbor's pet.

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Copyright (c) 2005, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

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Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch

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