Dialysis crisis followed shift by Medicaid
By Susan Jaffe | Plain Dealer Reporter | February 12, 2007
For the past year, a dialysis machine has been keeping Karletta Edwards’ mother alive, substituting for her kidneys to cleanse her blood three times a week.
But in January, shortly after Ohio’s Medicaid program transferred her, along with more
than 25,000 other low-income people in Northeast Ohio, into an HMO, something went wrong.
The state’s contracts with insurance companies are expected to save Medicaid $24 million this year, by the time some 125,000 blind, disabled or older people are placed in privately run managed care plans.
Even though the companies are paid 6.6 percent less, Medicaid’s average cost to care for the same population, state officials say the health coverage will remain the same…. Four weeks ago, Edwards received a desperate call from her mother. The transportation service that picked up Emma Hansen from her East Cleveland home and brought her to the dialysis center didn’t show up. [Continued here]
rnment rules and red tape that trap people in nursing homes who don’t want to be there, don’t need to be there and certainly don’t need to be driving up the state’s enormous nursing home costs (See Graphic, “Paying More for Less,” pg. 19). If it succeeds, the effort targeting 250 nursing home residents could save Ohio millions of dollars a year. Nursing home care costs an average of about $56,000 per resident a year in Ohio. Because Fry needs so little care, living on his own will save Medicaid roughly $50,000 a year.