Wednesday, June 04, 2003

Bush Administration Medicaid/SCHIP Proposal
This policy brief (in Adobe Acrobat format) from the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured "provides a detailed explanation of what is known about the key elements of the proposal and includes a discussion of the proposal's implications." See also the page of links to background materials on proposal.  
  

A Privacy Law's Unintended Results
New York Times article on some of the unintended results of the HIPAA rules on privacy - "the first federal privacy standards to limit how health care providers — hospitals, physicians, pharmacists and health insurers — can use and release medical information." [Viewing New York Times resources requires registration, which is free].  
  

Governors Finalizing Proposal to Revamp Medicaid
Washington Post story - "The nation's governors are nearing agreement on a plan that would fundamentally redesign Medicaid, handing states vast new powers to set health benefits for the poor, in exchange for ending part of the federal promise that subsidies will keep pace as the program grows. The draft plan, which has considerable support among Republican and Democratic governors, is similar in some of its basic contours to a proposal that the Bush administration issued four months ago to revamp the country's largest public insurance program. But the governors' version, which is to be refined during the next few days, would give states greater freedom over Medicaid and would loosen caps on federal payments that the administration has proposed."  
  

Medicaid in Massachusetts Relents on Restriction on Psychiatric Drugs
Boston Globe story reprinted at PsycPORT - "Massachusetts Medicaid officials have scrapped a plan to tightly restrict patients' access to the most powerful psychiatric drugs, saying that even though the state could have saved millions of dollars, it was not worth the health risks to an extremely fragile population."  
  

Waiting time, list drops for mentally ill inmates (South Carolina)
Story at The State - "The number of mentally ill inmates waiting for state treatment has been cut to a handful and the time it takes to receive treatment has decreased to less than three months, officials say. The head of a Department of Mental Health program that treats mentally ill people who have been charged with crimes said Tuesday the agency has added four beds, hired two more staffers and streamlined procedures to speed up treatment. ... a major change was allowing the program's medical staff to decide whether a patient should get more freedom to move about the grounds - a prerequisite for discharge."