- Nevada Medicaid officials confront decline in federal funds (reviewjournal.com)Las Vegas center gets probation for defrauding Medicaid (reviewjournal.com)Las Vegas health care provider sentenced for Medicaid fraud (reviewjournal.com)
State health officials gave legislators an overview of Nevada’s Medicaid program in an Assembly committee meeting...during which the program’s new administrator said the state program will be tackling a decrease in federal funding in coming years...“These rates are tied to the overall economy, so when the economy does better, we get a lower … rate from the federal government,” Suzanne Bierman, administrator...Department of Health and Human Services, said...The rate, called a federal medical assistance percentage, determines the share of Medicaid costs covered by the federal government. For the 2019 fiscal year, federal funds cover 65.09 percent of Medicaid costs...That number is expected to decrease to 64.17 percent in the next fiscal year...
- EDITORIAL: When the government can’t afford health care (reviewjournal.com)
If you want a glimpse of how single-payer health care would work, look at what’s happening to Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center...As the Review-Journal’s Jessie Bekker reported Wednesday, 70 percent of the families who use Sunrise’s neonatal intensive care unit are on Medicaid. Sunrise CEO Todd Sklamberg says that Medicaid pays the hospital a flat daily rate of $1,487 per baby. That’s around one-tenth of Sunrise’s average daily charge of $14,815...Mr. Sklamberg said the hospital’s deficit for uncompensated infant care was $77 million last year. If the Legislature doesn’t increase Medicaid reimbursement rates this session, he said, Sunrise will consider reducing NICU services for all patients. The hospital, he said, is on an “unsustainable trajectory.”...This is the aspect of single-payer health care that Bernie Sanders doesn’t talk about...