May 16 2013
Medicaid doctors continue to wait for their pay raise -- five months after they were supposed to get it. In Connecticut, some allege a backlog of applications for the program breaks federal law, and are suing to stop it.
Kaiser Health News: Capsules: Most Doctors Still Waiting On Medicaid Pay Raise
Five months after primary care doctors who treat Medicaid patients were supposed get a big pay raise, most physicians have yet to see it. Only three states have implemented the pay raise -- Nevada, Michigan and Massachusetts, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians (Galewitz, 5/14).
CT Mirror: Suit Hammers Huge Medicaid Backlog, Long Waits
Every month, thousands of poor state residents go without health care coverage while their applications for Medicaid linger, without being approved or denied, for longer than federal law allows. The numbers "tell the whole story," attorney Sheldon Toubman said Tuesday at the start of a trial in Hartford centered on allegations that the state Department of Social Services doesn't have enough workers to handle Medicaid applications within federally required time frames (Becker, 5/14).
This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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