Medicaid Managed Care - U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging

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In other States devolution is more a matter of way passing off
the risk and the responsibility to the counties. If there is no capacity
at the county level this becomes another area of concern.
There are a few other emerging issues that I would just like to
mention. Clearly, quality assurance is something that many States
need a huge amount of help with-and we intend to work in that
area.
Further, there are really very few performance standards for
serving special needs populations. This is another arena that we
also would like to work on.
Finally, the managed care marketplace is in enormous flux.
There may be 19 managed care organizations in Wisconsin all of
whom are willing to play. But in a lot of States, commercial managed
care organizations are leaving the <strong>Medicaid</strong> market; in others,
the managed care organizations that are based within the traditional
community provider network-community health centers
and so on are not succeeding. Who is going to be left providing
<strong>Medicaid</strong> managed care, particularly to the special needs populations?
Bob Hurley is doing a study on the <strong>Medicaid</strong> managed care
markeplace for us right now, and it should be a very, very interesting
sport.
Thanks very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Somers follows:]