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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.]

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Medicare dangles Rx carrot
By Susan Jaffe | Plain Dealer Reporter | February 12, 2005

Many of the nation’s major corporations providing retiree drug coverage will get help paying the bill – subsidies worth several billion dollars a year from federal taxpayers. The money totals roughly $71 billion tax-free through 2013 and is part of the Medicare Modernization Act, which added a drug benefit to Medicare. It is aimed at encouraging employers to maintain their coverage instead of forcing retirees onto Medicare’s tab. [Continued here]

Long term care, Medicare costs, Plain Dealer

You Can Go Home Again: A move to a nursing home needn’t be forever anymore.

A new Ohio program not only supports independent living, but also saves the state money.

By Susan Jaffe | Plain Dealer Reporter | November 7, 2004

Without Ohio’s Access Success Project, Larry Fry might have lived in a nursing home for the rest of his life. The program is unwinding the government 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. Continued in The Plain Dealer’s Sunday Magazine