Secretary To The Governor Melissa DeRosa Discusses Medicaid Deficit on NY1’s Inside City Hall With Errol Louis
Earlier today, Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa was a guest on NY1’s Inside City Hall with Errol Louis, where she discussed the Governor’s State of the State address and agenda for New York State. See below for thee section of the interview discussing the Medicaid Deficit.
Errol Louis: I know also in the budget address he’ll be more detailed about the $6 billion deficit that was mentioned today, although one of the things that the Governor did touch upon was that some of this came from the State picking up the local cost of increases in healthcare costs consistently over a number of years. Are we going to see a fight now between the Governor’s office and the localities including New York City over whether or not the State can or should continue to pick up those costs?
Melissa DeRosa: No Errol, what the Governor is saying is that nine years ago when we came in and we inherited a Medicaid crisis, one of the things that we did, the State did rightly, was that we took over all of the growth from Medicaid from the localities, so any growth above where it currently was in 2010, the State picked up the tab. We did this in large part because we also asked local governments to enact the first-ever property tax cap because property taxes across the state were crushing homeowners. This is not something we have in New York City, but everywhere else across the State.
What we’ve seen in the last several months and which you’ll be hearing more about in the budget in a couple of weeks is that when the State took over the growth in Medicaid costs and held the local governments’ harness but allowed the local governments to continue administering the Medicaid program, there was a loss of control in terms of how the money was being spent, when it was being spent, why it was being spent, and that has created structural issues that now have to be addressed.
We are not going to do this in a vacuum. We have a very successful Medicaid redesign team that we put into place nine years ago. We’re going to replicate that model this year. We’re going to get all the stakeholders around the table. No one wants to do anything to undermine the great progress we’ve made in healthcare.
As the Governor himself said today, New York State has 95 percent of our people are covered. We have very high quality of coverage. Medicaid covers a lot of different services. New York has taken full advantage of the Medicaid program so we don’t want to do anything to undermine any of those things but there is without a doubt waste, fraud and abuse within the system and there are different things structurally that can need and should happen now in order to get us back on the right financial footing. This is something we’ve dealt with before. It’s something we’re going to deal with again and we look forward to having that discussion in the coming weeks when we roll out the budget.
================
Stewart-Cousins says Cuomo still vague on plans for Medicaid shortfall
By Shannon Young Politico January 9, 2020
Despite how much the state’s Medicaid shortfall is expected to hang over the 2020 Legislative session, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said Thursday it is unclear how Gov. Andrew Cuomo plans to plug the $4 billion budget hole.
Stewart-Cousins told reporters “the governor has not made any specific recommendations” to Senate Democrats on how the state could rein in Medicaid spending before the fiscal year ends in March.
“We have not,” she said when asked if her conference has discussed adjusting the local share Medicaid payments — something Cuomo broached in his State of the State address — or targeted cuts to the program.
“[Cuomo’s] been talking about this for the past couple of weeks, so we have not had an opportunity as a conference to talk about it,” Stewart-Cousins said. “But obviously we are interested in, first and foremost, making sure that we continue to have health care for everybody.”
Meanwhile, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said Thursday his chamber will “address the spending imbalance in the Medicaid program while continuing our fight to ensure all New Yorkers have access to high quality, affordable health care.”
“We will protect our safety net facilities, small and rural hospitals and centers of community-based care throughout the state,” he said as he opened the 2020 Legislative session. “And we will ensure that our seniors and the disabled are able to stay in their own homes, in their communities, with dignity, comfort and respect….”