Republicans love the experimental Passport Health Plan managed medicaid provider for Jefferson and surrounding counties in Kentucky. After all, the top brass were hired from and during Ernie Fletcher’s corrupt administration, the dental provider has hired Republican state senator Julie Denton at an undisclosed and presumably obscene salary to perform minimal duties despite the conflict of interest presented by Denton chairing the senate committee overseeing the Cabinet which pays Passport’s bills.
However, the bottom line is that privatizing markedly governmental services, such as administration of indigent health care, while appealing for the chance to dole out more governmental pork from funds cut out of actual indigent care, is an epic failure.
Two years ago, Passport actually attempted to sell itself to an out of state health care provider, despite the fact that by law Passport is a partnership of private and public interests within the state of Kentucky. The attempt failed, because Pennsylvania regulators rejected the bizarre proposal.
Yesterday, Kentucky Medicaid Commissioner Elizabeth Johnson documented the bottom line of the privatization experiment known as Passport: a 20 % increase per client in Medicaid spending. That bloated expense is also tied to a decrease in the quality of care in many areas, including rubber stamp rejection of coverage for medical conditions. If saving several tens of millions of dollars per year is of interest, it is time to pull the plug on this failure of privatizing government, and time to pull the plug on the well-positioned cronies being paid for their political pedigrees instead of their abilities to manage health care programs, and give the clients consistent and decent medicaid care that isn’t sacrificed to finance administrative salaries.
Passport Health Plan, often praised for its efficiency as Kentucky’s only Medicaid managed care venture, costs the state far more per person than the state’s regular Medicaid program, a key state official contends.
The assertion was made in a five-page letter sent Tuesday by state Medicaid Commissioner Elizabeth Johnson — and strongly disputed by Passport officials — to the staff of the House budget committee.
The panel is considering an expansion of the Passport approach as one of many ways to save money to help plug a $1.5 billion revenue shortfall in the 2010-12 state budget.
Passport — a consortium of hospitals, doctors and other health-care providers — was created in 1997 to apply the efficiencies of managed care to limit the soaring costs of the Medicaid program in a region that includes Jefferson and 15 surrounding counties.
Managed care aims to achieve savings by keeping clients within a network of providers.
Passport has generally been credited with achieving big savings. House Speaker Greg Stumbo, D-Prestonsburg, said last Friday that the House was looking at expanding “some of the programs that we know work like the Passport program.”
But Johnson said in her letter that during fiscal 2009 the state spent $388.89 per member per month for coverage provided by Passport — 21 percent more than the $321.59 it spent to insure those in the regular Medicaid program.
The letter attributes the difference to much higher administrative expenses for Passport, as well as higher costs for some medical expenses, particularly for inpatient hospital care.
It said the Medicaid program’s per-member spending for comparable coverage under Passport “is higher than in other Medicaid regions of the state and for the state as a whole. And its rate of growth exceeds the growth rate of Medicaid expenditures in the remainder of the state.”
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