Join Milliman’s Christine Mytelka and Andrew Gaffner for the webinar “Medicaid pass-through payment guidance” on Tuesday, May 24, at 12 pm EST. They will provide an overview of pass-through payment provisions in the new Medicaid managed care regulations. This is the first in a series of Milliman articles and webinars focused on the new Medicaid managed care rule. To register, click here.
As managed care has replaced fee-for-service (FFS) in the Medicaid market, states have often sought to replicate fee-for-service supplemental provider payment programs in managed care. Supplemental payment programs, sometimes called upper payment limit (UPL) programs, constitute a major source of revenue for providers in many states. Pass-through payments are the primary mechanism currently used to retain supplemental payment funding in managed care.
Final Medicaid managed care regulations, released April 25, 2016, confirm that pass-through payments will be restricted in the near future and ultimately eliminated. In this paper, Milliman’s Andrew Gaffner, Carmen Laudenschlager, and Christine Mytelka provide an overview of pass-through payment provisions in the new regulations, including the rationale and phase-out timing of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). They also discuss some of the difficulties the loss of pass-through payments will cause for states and providers and suggest a number of potential changes states can consider to mitigate the impact on managed care programs.
Alternative Benefit Plan (ABP) regulations have created the ability for states to offer benefit plans tailored to the needs of a particular population, such as the Medicaid expansion population. These regulations require exemption for vulnerable populations, including one new exempt population: the “medically frail.” This population includes foster care children and those who meet Social Security disability criteria, but also includes anyone with a serious and complex medical condition or a disabling mental or chronic substance use disorder.
States are seeking a methodology to help them identify the medically frail, one that would be both accurate and administratively efficient. This paper describes a methodology that has been used successfully for identifying a similar population in the Healthy Indiana Plan, a Medicaid expansion program initially authorized in 2008 under 1115 waiver authority.
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