Latest California Healthline Stories
Pediatric Centers Must Pay Retroactively
If you were running a business on a shoestring budget, how hard would it be to pay off a lump sum payment equal to 10% of costs for the past 10 months?
That’s the question Terry Racciato would like to ask officials at the Department of Health Care Services.
Racciato, president of two Together We Grow pediatric day health centers in San Diego, is facing the prospect of paying the state $200,000 or more for what she considers to be a state administrative mistake.
Advocates File Contempt Motion Against State
The settlement now is officially unsettled.
Disability Rights California, which filed and then settled a lawsuit challenging the transition of adult day health care by the Department of Health Care Services, now has filed a contempt motion saying that DHCS officials have not been following the terms of the agreement.
That settlement prompted the state’s creation of the Community Based Adult Services program, due to launch Sunday, the day after ADHC is eliminated as a Medi-Cal benefit.
Inland Empire Hospitals Grapple With Chronic Bed Shortage
With a chronic shortage of hospital beds, Inland Empire hospitals are expected to be sheltered from fiscal pressures from the federal health reform law, and at least one hospital has plans to expand instead of making cuts.
Legislative Hearing Looks at Transition Plans
During a Senate subcommittee review of a number of state health care proposals yesterday, one theme seemed to stand out: People are unhappy with them.
The budget subcommittee on Health and Human Services heard proposals by the Department of Health Care Services to cut health plan rate reimbursement for Healthy Families’ children by 25%. In addition, DHCS intends to move 900,000 children from that program into Medi-Cal managed care. The committee also heard from a long parade of people who opposed those proposals.
After all the testimony and acrimony, subcommittee chair Mark DeSaulnier (D-Concord) didn’t quite know what to say.
Solution to Physician Shortage May Lie in Mid-Level Practitioners
Ed Hernandez, an optometrist, can see it coming.
The Democrat Senate member from West Covina yesterday helped convene the second hearing in a week to explore the looming shortage of primary care providers in California. The addition of millions of newly insured along with a likely decline in the number of physicians in California is an equation that worries Hernandez. He said the gap is unlikely to be filled in traditional ways.
“Last week we looked at the shortage of providers in California, a shortage that will not lessen,” Hernandez said yesterday at a joint meeting of the Senate Committee on Health and the Senate Committee on Business, Professions and Economic Development.
Designing Exchange Framework as Building Begins
Creating a statewide insurance exchange has been compared to drawing plans for a skyscraper while pouring the foundation — under a tight deadline. We invited experts and stakeholders to share advice with designers and builders of the California Health Benefit Exchange.
Aid for Pregnant Women Pushes Through Committee
Holly Mitchell, for the first time in recent memory, was speechless.
Assembly member Mitchell (D-Los Angeles), who is known for being voluble and quick-tongued, yesterday had a bill before the Assembly Committee on Human Services.
AB 1640 is designed to allow low-income pregnant women to use TANF money (federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) without proving that they’re in their third trimester of pregnancy.
Clues to How the Supreme Court Might Rule on Health Reform
The fate of the Affordable Care Act rests in the hands of the Supreme Court justices, who next week will hear oral arguments over three days. How the court might rule is a hot topic — and several historic court decisions provide some hints as to which way the case will go.
Hearing Focuses on Children’s Dental Care
Assembly member Richard Pan (D-Sacramento) knew the subject was a little out of the ken of the workforce committee, but that it was too important to be ignored.
“One of principles in looking at whether we have an adequate workforce is to make sure we can take care of our patients,” Pan said. “We need to take care of the oral health needs of children, and that depends, in part, on availability of coverage, and payment for those services.”
Pan, chairman of the Assembly Select Committee on Health Care Workforce and Access to Care, presided over a recent hearing on children’s oral health in Sacramento County.
Pediatric Centers Argue Retroactive Payments Don’t Make Sense
California’s 14 pediatric day health centers are a form of home health agency serving a 21-and-under population. Those are two groups exempted from the state’s 10% Medi-Cal provider rate reductions in June.
PDHC operators assumed they were exempt from that rate reduction. That notion was reinforced by the absence of PDHCs on the list of providers in the state plan amendment (SPA) that the state sent to CMS for approval of the rate decrease.
Officials at the Department of Health Care Services, when alerted about the discrepancy, recently decided that, yes, PDHCs should be exempt from that rate decrease. This was great news for the PDHCs, which operate on a tight and limited budget — except for one thing.