Switch to Medicare to cost state millions

By Susan Jaffe  |  Plain Dealer Reporter  |  October 20, 2005

Ohio’s financially strapped Medicaid program will pay millions more when low-income seniors switch to Medicare for their prescription drugs next year.  The federal law that established the new Medicare drug benefit requires the nearly 200,000 seniors in Medicaid – the state health-care program for low-income people – to transfer to Medicare for drug coverage. The law also says that states must reimburse the federal government for 90 percent of those seniors’ drug costs. But any savings that states expected have vanished because of the controversial formula Medicare used to figure how much they owe. The switch will cost Ohio $35 million more in 2007 than if the seniors now in Medicaid had stayed there. [Continued here.]