Public Citizen Ranks Medicaid Programs

The watchdog group Public Citizen says U.S. state Medicaid programs have severe deficiencies and suffer from disparities of coverage and eligibility.

The Ralph Nader-founded organization said the federal Medicaid program, which provides health care coverage to 55 million mostly low-income Americans, fails to deliver adequate services because of differing state eligibility requirements, benefits and performance.

The Public Citizen report issued Wednesday ranked the state-operated Medicaid programs, and identified states performing well or lagging with respect to the rest of the nation and accepted benchmarks for care.

The highest-ranking states earned only 64.6 percent of the maximum points possible under the group’s scoring system, and 30 states ranked in the bottom 10 in at least one category.

Federal standards are so inadequate that no state has a truly excellent Medicaid program, said Sidney Wolfe, director of the organization’s health research group.

The 10 worst programs as identified by Public Citizen were in Mississippi, Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Indiana, South Carolina, Colorado, Alabama and Missouri.

The best programs were in Massachusetts, Nebraska, Vermont, Alaska, Wisconsin, Rhode Island, Minnesota, New York, Washington and New Hampshire.

The full report is available at www.citizen.org/medicaid.