03/29/2024

Is Real Medicaid Reform Possible? Two States–Indiana And Rhode Island–Show That It Is

TWO STATES, Rhode Island and Indiana, have been able to make major changes to the traditional Medicaid programs, which allowed them to curb costs and enhance their recipients’ quality of care. Patient satisfaction went up sharply.

In 2009 Rhode Island sought and won an unprecedented waiver from Washington. Gary Alexander, the state’s secretary of health and human services at the time, describes what happened: “We agreed to a fixed amount of funding from [the federal government] for five years; in return, the feds agreed to waive the burdensome restrictions that prevented us from instituting imaginative reforms, such as shared living for seniors, delivery of a specialty to only the small patient cohort that needed and benefited from it and improved reimbursement incentives for home care and prevention.”

View Article