Latest California Healthline Stories
Trigger Cuts Not the Only Worry for Disabled
Yesterday’s announcement of $1 billion in trigger cuts for California’s budget includes two provisions that hit the developmentally disabled community.
One of those provisions, to scale back In-Home Supportive Services by 20%, is already in court. A federal judge last week issued a temporary restraining order to halt implementation of that cut, pending a hearing scheduled for tomorrow.
The other big budget reduction for the disabled — a $100 million cut to the Department of Developmental Services — is going to be much more difficult to fight in court, according to Tony Anderson, executive director of The Arc of California, which advocates for the developmentally disabled.
Politics Have Always Been Part of Policy — but Have We Hit a New Low?
Berwick’s out. Overruling the FDA is in. A flurry of recent headlines recall another moment when politics and health policy collided and set the nation on a new course.
How To Protect Seniors During Duals Conversion?
Yesterday’s stakeholder meeting to help plan the duals conversion pilots was partially notable for what it was not.
It was not rancorous, it was not loud and the discussion went relatively smoothly for the Department of Health Care Services, compared with last week’s grilling of DHCS over the smaller conversion of SPDs (seniors and persons with disabilities) to managed care.
“Hearing the issues here today is very important for us,” Melanie Bella of CMS said at the end of the meeting. “A couple of things we said were non-negotiable here are stakeholder involvement, meaningful stakeholder involvement and consumer protections.”
Clashing Views of Transition for Seniors, Disabled
Either the state’s transition to managed care is going great, or it’s a confusing mess.
That would depend on who’s talking. At a joint oversight hearing last week, convened by the Senate and the Assembly committees on health, government officials outlined a generally positive picture for the effort to move Medi-Cal seniors and people with disabilities (SPDs) from Medi-Cal fee-for-service to managed care.
“The transition of seniors and people with disabilities into managed care is part of the triple mandate from [the federal] HHS,” according to Jane Ogle, deputy director at the Department of Health Care Services. “Better health, better quality and more cost-effective care.”
Two Faces of Mental Health Treatment in California
County and community mental health care providers are optimistic about a major overhaul of California’s mental health services that includes plans for a new state agency and a realignment of management and funding.
Free Data Spark Innovation, Proponents Say
One of the keys to successful health care innovation is the freeing-up of data, according to Todd Park, chief technology officer for the federal HHS.
“We are working on so many exciting things right now, but the initiative we’re most excited about is the health data initiative,” Park said. “We are unleashing the power of open data and open innovation.”
Park was one of a group of experts who convened in Sacramento Wednesday for a health information technology forum put on by the Center for Health Improvement. One of the co-sponsors was the California HealthCare Foundation, which publishes California Healthline.
New Evidence of Seniors’ Vulnerability
Kathryn Kietzman and other researchers from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research conducted a series of interviews with California seniors and their families over a one-year period. Their ongoing monitoring yielded worrisome results, Kietzman said — particularly seeing the effect on those seniors of a number of seemingly small budget cuts.
“Even those seniors with low-level needs were strongly affected by these cuts,” Kietzman said, referring primarily to a 3.6% reduction in In-Home Supportive Services and also to a cutback in monthly Supplemental Security Income and State Supplementary Payments. “What we saw was a culmination of sometimes little cuts, sometimes bigger cuts,” she said. “Many times we follow these things at the policy level, but [here] we’ve seen changes at the individual level, particularly for people with chronic care conditions.”
Those cutbacks don’t begin to compare with the state’s trigger cut of 20% of IHSS care, and a state-estimated halving of service to people currently receiving adult day health care services, Kietzman said.
Diabetes Project Tries To Reach Valley Hmong Community
Healthy House, a health and community services coalition in Merced, is using a $50,000 grant to launch a diabetes education and treatment project for the Central Valley’s large Hmong community.
Mandatory Enrollment Draws Attention From Legislators
The state wants to move fee-for-service Medi-Cal beneficiaries who are seniors and persons with disabilities into managed care plans. At the same time, the state is in the initial stages of launching a demonstration project to eventually move up to 1.1 million dual eligibles — those eligible for both Medicare and Medi-Cal benefits — into managed care.
Today in Sacramento, those two significant efforts get some legislative oversight. The Senate and Assembly health committees are holding a joint hearing on how those two efforts will be conducted.
“We want the health care system to be more efficient, but without sacrificing patient care,” Assembly member Bill Monning (D-Carmel) said. “The objective [of both efforts] is to improve patient care. So this is an opportunity to have some transparency for the public and some oversight.”
What a Waste: Why We Can’t Rein In Extra Health Spending
Don Berwick took a parting shot at the waste in the U.S. health system as he stepped down at CMS, reinvigorating a question as old as Medicare: Why isn’t our system more efficient?