Privatizing NC’s Medicaid Program

Turning over critical government services to private companies.  It’s been a siren call for conservatives over the last few years with disastrous results.  When President Bush issued the call to privatize Social Security benefits for millions of Americans, allowing for-profit investment firms the opportunity to “manage” billions in public dollars, the public reacted with growing skepticism and finally sound rejection of  the proposal.  Conservatives were more successful in getting “pilot projects” of for-profit HMOs into the nation’s Medicare program. The HMOs require millions in public subsidies because they are so much less efficient than the traditional Medicare program.  Hardball sales tactics that hurt the elderly, benefits often no better than traditional Medicare and big profits for these HMOs were the result.

Now the privatization push has come to the NC Medicaid program.  Driven by the NC Senate and powerful Democratic Senator Tony Rand (see Senate Bill 1042), this effort aims to bring to NC’s Medicaid program all the “innovations” being brought to the federal Medicare program by for-profit HMOs.  Why a Democrat is reading from what is essentially a page from the Republican playbook is truly a mystery.

Driven by for-profit Amerigroup, a company just hit with a recent $144 million judgment against it for discriminating against pregnant women in Illinois to pump up profits, rumor is that a proposed series of  “pilot programs” could become how the entire Medicaid program is run.

Of course, North Carolina already manages the care of Medicaid patients.  NC Medicaid has saved over $300 million in the last few years through its innovative Community Care program.  It’s a national model and a finalist for one of the most prestigious health policy awards in the country for government programs from Harvard University this year.  This is because it saves money not by denying care or lowering reimbursements to doctors – like a for-profit HMO – but by encouraging families, doctors and Medicaid to all work together to focus on preventive care and overcoming barriers so people with chronic disease stay out of the hospital and in their own communities.

Turning our back on NC’s remarkable Community Care to privatize our Medicaid program and turn over care for our most vulnerable citizens to for-profit HMOs is the height of folly.   Let’s hope reason prevails.

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