By skyforbes 
Priorities for Iowa, a nonpartisan 501(c)4 focused on educating Iowans, today called for Iowa State Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal (D-Council Bluffs) to review the facts before describing the old, antiquated Medicaid system as working “pretty well.”
Despite Sen. Gronstal’s wishful thinking, the old Medicaid system is not in the best interest of Iowa taxpayers nor the patients the system serves.
FACT: Under the old system, the top 5 percent of Iowa’s high-cost, high-risk members account for:
· 75 percent of total patient cost,
· 50 percent of prescription drug cost, and
· 90 percent of all hospital readmissions within 30 days.
These high-risk patients have an average of 4.2 conditions, 5 physicians and 5.6 prescribers.
FACT: Medicaid costs in Iowa are $4.2 billion annually, which represents a 73 percent cost increase since 2003 to the taxpayers who fund it. Even more troubling, total Medicaid expenditures are expected to grow by 21 percent in the coming years.
FACT: 39 states and Washington, D.C., contract with managed care organizations to provide patient care. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) wrote in December that it “expects that we will ultimately be able to approve Iowa’s managed care waivers.”
FACT: Managed care increases healthy outcomes. The CMS December letter to Iowa stated, “Managed care can increase access to quality care for Medicaid beneficiaries, reduce costs, and improve the health of communities.”
“Senator Mike Gronstal is trying to have it both ways. Less than a year after including Medicaid modernization savings in his chamber’s Department of Human Services budget — thereby recognizing the need to improve patient outcomes and protect taxpayers’ dollars through a modern approach — Senator Gronstal is now flip-flopping and embracing the broken Medicaid system,” said Priorities for Iowa executive director Jimmy Centers. “Iowa’s Medicaid patients and the taxpayers who fund the system deserve a modern approach that will improve healthy outcomes while reducing the skyrocketing costs of Medicaid services.”