Taking Over The Local Share of Medicaid

“We have to provide relief to homeowners and businesses. We have to control costs, while making sure patients get high quality care.” — Stephanie Miner

New York is the only state in the country that forces its counties to share Medicaid costs, despite those counties having no control over the program. In the 57 counties outside New York City, these costs eat up an average of 40% of the property tax revenue.

Lax rules and poor oversight from Albany have pushed our state and county governments to the breaking point. New York spends as much on Medicaid as Texas and Pennsylvania combined and at S3,054 per capita, New York spends 76% above the national average and is the highest in the nation. Sadly, these costs not only have not resulted in better care for patients, the federal government currently ranks the quality of New York State’s hospitals the lowest in the country.

There is an urgent need to streamline these system. Three national studies found that doctors are spending as much as half their day filing Electronic Medical Records (EMR), twice the amount they are spending with patients. EMRs have been made incredibly cumbersome with extra layers of complexity as the state, insurance companies and hospital administrators add new regulations. In 2018 alone, 133 mandate bills were introduced in the New York legislature. While each may have been presented to help patients, the end result is a system that does the opposite.

As governor, I will:

• Have the state to assume the total cost of Medicaid for the 57 counties outside of New York City over a five year period.
• Currently, a 3% cap on costs is in effect. We will replace this with a hard cap on current Medicaid spending.
• Rather than also assuming the $5.3 billion cost of the New York City share of Medicaid, the state should outline a comprehensive plan to fix the MTA. New York City will also benefit from this measure as overall Medicaid costs decline.

• Provide tax relief to by mandating counties pass savings back to property owners.
• Streamline the state agencies tasked with fighting fraud, waste, and abuse and implement the measures outlined by the Comptroller’s Office in July 2016 to strengthen the state’s Medicaid Managed Care Organization Fraud and Abuse Detection program by, among other things, establishing appropriate criteria for a full-time Special Investigation Units for managed care organizations and revising the managed care model contract to require MCOs to meet the new criteria.
• Push for hospitals to measure and report the amount of time they spend on EMRs, so we can establish appropriate baselines for careWe will also work with EMR vendors to ensure medical documentation is right-sized for the benefit of patients first.

For more information on Stephanie Miner, and to donate, please visit www.minerforny.com