HCA’s State Advocacy Day on February 5 drew dozens of home care, hospice and Managed Long Term Care representatives to Albany within hours of Governor Cuomo officially naming the members of his Medicaid Redesign Team (MRT).
As we reported in January’s Capitol Report, the Governor’s MRT advisory panel is tasked with devising $2.5 billion in Medicaid savings for the coming state budget, due April 1, all in just a few weeks’ time.
HCA is urging a voice for our proposals in the Medicaid redesign process — a role that is pressing now that the MRT has headed into an ambitious schedule of meetings and hearings, eyeing a final vote by mid-March.
Community care’s voice in the process is especially important given the focus on long term care in the MRT discussions thus far, and considering HCA’s readiness to offer productive solutions from our expertise and representation of a vital field that supports the medical, social, assistive, therapeutic, and end-of-life needs of nearly 900,000 New Yorkers at home.
We urge the Legislature to embrace HCA’s plan for Medicaid cost-offsets as the Senate and Assembly weigh the MRT’s recommendations.
HCA’s proposals, shared with all legislative offices in a briefing paper here, contain various parts that fall into a few main themes: maximizing non-Medicaid payors for coverage of long term care (in lieu of Medicaid); procedural flexibilities and stronger cost controls in long term care; and resourceful leveraging of chronic-disease management programs in home care.
On HCA’s Advocacy Day, we also shared with your office the findings of HCA’s 2020 State of the Industry Report. It shows some of the financial struggles facing community-based organizations amid new obligations and responsibilities that are a legacy of MRT I, for which “Medicaid funds have fallen short while nevertheless adding to the state’s budget pressures.”
The report’s findings provide yet further basis for an approach that takes great care in constraining costs productively, avoiding upheavals in payment and programs involving services to vulnerable populations that are already under considerable financing strain. As we noted in a statement to the media on February 5: “Among the Governor’s parameters for the MRT are ‘no impact on local governments’ and ‘no impact on beneficiaries.’ We would add: ‘no impact on the provider infrastructure necessary to serve beneficiaries.'” Our proposals permit this.
HCA is happy to brief your office on our positions or follow-up from meetings during HCA’s State Advocacy Day. Do not hesitate to contact HCA’s Director for Public Policy and Advocacy Alyssa Lovelace at (518) 810-0658 or alovelace@hcanys.org. Below are some resource links, including items referenced in this article, for your consideration.