A recent report from the Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, confirms that it will likely become harder to get access to care through Medicaid’s managed care program – a program that Illinois is using to provide care to an increasing number of Medicaid enrollees. With Medicaid enrollment...

The proportion of Illinois Medicaid enrollees found to be ineligible remains high, according to the state’s Medicaid Redetermination Project Quarterly Report for the second quarter of 2014. But here’s the kicker: The state will end up paying for more and more of them, regardless of eligibility. According to the report, 55 percent of the reviewed...

In its first annual report, GetCovered Illinois touts “succeeding in enrolling more than 600,000 people in health coverage through the Illinois Health Insurance Marketplace and Medicaid.” But by very selectively picking and choosing what information to make public, Illinois officials are failing to provide any real insight into whether the state has actually achieved its...

According to a federal audit released Aug. 18, Illinois’ Medicaid program routinely over-estimated the amount of funds it needed from federal coffers to the tune of nearly $1 billion from 2010 through 2012. Over that three-year period, the state would spend the Medicaid money elsewhere and was slow in repaying the federal government, costing federal...

When the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, was signed into law, three out of 10 physicians were not accepting new Medicaid patients. So to entice more physicians to participate in the Medicaid program, the federal government began temporarily paying higher reimbursements for some of primary care physicians’ routine services. But temporarily boosting a narrow subset...

The problem When the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as ACA or ObamaCare, was first implemented, more than three out of 10 physicians across the country were not accepting new patients in Medicaid, a joint state-federal program that is meant to cover the costs of providing health care to the poor. But rather than offering...