Minnesota Released Medicaid Annual Report.
The Minnesota Department of Human Services recently released the first-ever Medicaid annual report, Medicaid Matters: The Impact of Minnesota’s Medicaid Program. The report was created to increase awareness of the program and its impact on every Minnesotan. The report covers a lot of history about Medicaid, and indicated “Medicaid is the nation’s single largest health care insurer, covering approximately 77.7 million people in the United States in 2016 – more than one million of whom live in Minnesota.”
According to the report “In 1966, Minnesota implemented the state’s Medicaid program, which is called Medical Assistance. Today, it covers one out of ev*ery five Minnesotans. As the third largest insurer in the state after self-insured employer-based coverage and Medicare, it makes up nearly 16 percent of the state’s health insurance market. Minnesota is known for its comprehensive approach to providing Medicaid coverage. Minnesota covers a broad group of people and services beyond the minimum standards set in federal law. This includes expanding coverage to higher-income children and adults and covering long-term care in the home and community instead of an institutional setting. Minnesota also covers many special populations in need of services who would otherwise be ineligible for Medicaid because of their income level, including children with disabilities whose parents are given the option to access Medicaid by paying a parental fee, women who have been diagnosed with breast or cervical cancer through the state’s cancer screening program, and families in need of family planning services.”
Highlights in the report include:
- In Minnesota, total spending on Medicaid services provided to enrollees in 2016 reached approximately $11.4 billion. The Medicaid program spent more on home and community-based services than any other category of service.
- DHS uses a number of different tools to monitor the quality of health care services delivered to Medicaid and MinnesotaCare program enrollees. A combination of health care claims data and enrollee surveys allows DHS to review trends in health care access and quality in order to respond to enrollee needs.
- Minnesota has long been a leader in health care from its pioneering payment-and-delivery reform efforts to its continued commitment to supporting a comprehensive and affordable health care system for people regardless of their income.