The Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission has issued its annual report to Congress on the state of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
The commission, a non-partisan legislative branch agency that provides policy and data analysis and makes recommendations to Congress, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, and the states on a wide array of subjects, issues a report every year at this time. This year’s report focuses primarily on:
- Medicaid race and ethnicity data collection and reporting
- principles for assessing Medicaid nursing facility payment programs
- strengthening evidence under Medicaid drug coverage
- MACPAC’s statutorily required review of hospital payment policy for the nation’s safety-net hospitals – specifically, to report on Medicaid disproportionate share hospital (Medicaid DSH) allotments to states.
On the subject of Medicaid DSH, MedPAC states that
As in prior years, the Commission continues to find little meaningful relationship between state DSH allotments and the number of uninsured individuals; the amounts and sources of hospitals’ uncompensated care costs; and the number of hospitals with high levels of uncompensated care that also provide essential community services for low-income and uninsured populations.
The Alliance of Safety-Net Hospitals shares MACPAC’s concern about the ability of the current Medicaid DSH program to direct needed resources to the community safety-net hospitals that care for especially large numbers of low-income and uninsured patients. For this reason, ASH has developed a proposal that it believes does a better job of identifying the community safety-net hospitals with the greatest needs and distributing additional Medicaid (and Medicare) supplemental funds to them more effectively to ensure their future ability to provide access to care and pursue health equity in their diverse, generally low-income communities. Learn more from ASH’s “Proposal to Advance Health Equity.”
Learn more about MACPAC’s perspective on Medicaid and CHIP in its report to Congress.
