Medicaid

By David Ernesto Munar

As part of its debt ceiling negotiations, the Obama Administration is on the verge of undermining one of the most significant policies it has put in place to alleviate the nation’s 30-year HIV/AIDS crisis, which directly affects more than 1.2 million Americans.  

In a sad twist of irony, the White House proposal to rollback critical health benefits, essential to the control of HIV/AIDS, is emerging on the one-year anniversary of the National HIV/AIDS Strategy, unveiled by President Obama in July 2010.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that the White House is considering deep federal funding cuts for state Medicaid programs, a proposal which could have an immediate, chilling effect on efforts to meet the benchmark goals described in the National HIV/AIDS Strategy.  Moreover, it would render the federal health reform law virtually meaningless for millions of low-income Americans.  

The Chicago AIDS Foundation Director of Government Relations, John Peller, testified at a recent hearing on healthcare reform by The Illinois Healthcare Reform Implementation Council in Springfield.   

Our brilliant friends over at the Shriver National Center on Poverty Law wrote a fantastic piece on a little-known provision under discussion in the health reform debate: expansion of Medicaid, the nation's health program for low-income people, to cover all childless adults.  This provision would, for the first time, give comprehensive health coverage to hundreds of thousands of low-income people with HIV. 

Here's a tantalizing snippet of the Shiriver article:

In 2006, Illinois Medicaid began the Illinois Health Connect primary care case management (PCCM) program.  Illinois Health Connect assigns most Medicaid enrollees to a medical home, a primary care physician who is responsible for managing the patient’s care.  Several thousand people with HIV on Medicaid are enrolled in Illinois Health Connect.

[From our good friend John Bouman at the Shriver Center] As Illinois debates how to fix its disastrous budget, several politicians and interest groups are claiming that the State can save a billion dollars just by moving Medicaid enrollees to HMO-style capitated managed care...

by John Bouman, President, Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, via The Shriver Brief

via Chicago Sun-Times