• More on Arkansas’s private option

      March 9, 2013 at 8:00 am
      Austin Frakt

    Arkansas’s “private option” — to cover its Medicaid expansion population with private exchange plans — is on sound legal footing if its costs are “comparable” to standard Medicaid. But what does that mean? I’m not going to get into it because Adrianna McIntyre and Karan Chhabra already have in a new post. Just read them.

    @afrakt

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      Health Policy
      Medicaid expansion

    • by jamzo on March 9th, 2013 at 11:38

      Sarah Kliff…washington post wonk blog

      “George Washington University’s Sara Rosenbaum, an expert on Medicaid policy, recently dove into the regulations to answer these questions. She wrote an excellent policy primer here and, on Thursday, we had a lengthy conversation about it. What follows is a transcript of that discussion, lightly edited for clarity and length….”

      http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/08/privatizing-the-medicaid-expansion-every-state-will-be-eying-this/

      “Sara Rosenbaum: It’s been treated as this brand, new thing, but I don’t actually think it’s completely revolutionary. Keep in mind that states have been using Medicaid to buy managed care plans since the beginning of Medicaid. The whole notion of this as a conceptual breakthrough for Medicaid feels a bit off for me.

      It does happen though that this is in Arkansas, which traditionally has not been a buyer of managed care, not a place like Arkansas, and not somewhere like Texas which has been buying managed care.

      One of the good things about it, from my perspective, is that it gives you more stability of coverage, or gives you the chance at stability. You’re brought into a plan to stay”

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    • by jamzo on March 9th, 2013 at 17:16

      also of relevance is

      http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/more-on-arkansass-private-option/#comments

      Health Insurers See Big Opportunities In Health Law’s Medicaid Expansion

      “For industry titans such as UnitedHealthcare and WellPoint, as well as smaller, Medicaid-focused plans such as Molina, the Medicaid expansion is expected to bring significant enrollment and revenue growth. “This is several hundreds of billions of dollars of new market opportunity for these plans over the next couple of years,” says Jason Gurda, managing director of healthcare with investment bank Leerink Swann in New York.

      The plans already cover about half of all Medicaid recipients, or almost 30 million people. The Congressional Budget Office projects that eight million people more people will enroll in the program next year, with the number growing to 12 million people by 2020, as a result of the health law.”

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