Medicaid Long-Term Care Residents First To Go Into Managed Care

Excerpt from: wfsu (click for full article)

 

This week the federal government signed off on the first part of a plan steering three million low-income Floridians on Medicaid into a managed care or HMO system. The decision comes two years after state lawmakers approved the conversion in an attempt to control costs in the $22 billion program. When the measure was first approved, many people were skeptical about how it would work.

“For-profit companies have a fiduciary responsibility to do what? Make money. So they’re not going to manage their care, they’re going to ration their care,” said Joseph Flynn, a retiree living in the Central Florida community of the Villages, where Governor Rick Scott was holding his first budget signing ceremony at the time.