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Verma Unveils State Medicaid Scorecard But Refuses To Judge Efforts

Seema Verma, head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, refused to discuss the "scorecard" findings in any detail. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

The Trump administration Monday released聽a intended to show how the nation鈥檚 largest health program is performing. But the nation鈥檚 top Medicaid official didn鈥檛 want to draw any conclusions.

鈥淭his is about bringing a level of transparency and accountability to the Medicaid program that we have never had before,鈥 said Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Yet in a meeting with reporters, Verma refused to discuss the findings in any detail or comment on any individual states聽that performed poorly or exceptionally.

鈥淚 will let you look at the data and make your own conclusions,鈥 she told journalists a few minutes before the report was posted online.

When reporters pressed Verma to comment on聽the document, she refused to give an assessment of the Medicaid program, the federal-state health program for low-income residents. She has run Medicaid for the past 15 months.

鈥淭he idea here is to give you a sense of where states are on different areas,鈥 she said. 鈥淭he idea is to be used for best practices,鈥 and it鈥檚聽鈥渁n opportunity for us to identify鈥 and have discussions with聽states that aren鈥檛聽performing聽well.

Medicaid covers about 75 million people, about half of them children.

The report looked at how well states provide a wide variety of health services to children and adults. It also reviewed how quickly the federal government was approving state waiver requests to change their programs.

But聽not all states provided data for each service because sharing information was voluntary.

For example, half the states did not show how well they control Medicaid .

The National Association of Medicaid Directors . It acknowledged the need for a system to measure performance but said its members have concerns about its accuracy and usefulness.

鈥淭here are significant methodological issues with the underlying data, including completeness, timeliness, and quality,鈥 the association said in a statement. It noted that most of the data comes from 2015.

As expected, the data showed great variation in how states provide care, including immunizing teenagers or getting dental care to children. A big reason is that state Medicaid benefits and payments to doctors vary dramatically, the Medicaid directors said, so that 鈥渋t will not be聽possible to make apples-to-apples comparisons between states.鈥

In her first public speech, Verma promised last November to release a Medicaid scorecard. She said states won鈥檛 immediately face any consequences for poor performance 鈥 but that could change.

鈥淭he data聽鈥β燽egins to offer taxpayers insights into how their dollars are being spent and the impact those dollars have on health outcomes,鈥 Verma said Monday.

Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of health law and policy at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who previously led a congressional advisory board on Medicaid, suggested that the information聽is still too incomplete to be of great value.

鈥淚t is amazing to me that in 2018 this is all we have when trying to understand how the nation鈥檚 largest insurer performs for its poorest and most vulnerable residents,鈥 she said.


黑料吃瓜网 News鈥 coverage of children鈥檚 health care issues is supported in part by the .

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