Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch issued a plan Monday to cut the fraud, massive waste and duplication that he sees in New York’s $50 billion-a-year Medicaid system, The Associated Press reports.
The plan would bite into a sprawling health care coverage that consumes a third of the state’s budget and now serves nearly one in every four New Yorkers.
“For reasons of history, bureaucratic inertia, and politics, New York’s Medicaid program is not administered in the most rational or cost-effective manner,” Ravitch said in the report.
Ravitch makes several recommendations, including the transfer of setting rates paid to physicians and hospitals from the Legislature to the Health Department, with an independent commission to advise the governor and Legislature on policy. He also would end payments into Medicaid by cash-strapped counties.
The report is part of a major long-term fiscal analysis to fix New York’s finances that Ravitch was asked to take on by Gov. David Paterson. It is the result of months of work by Ravitch, whose fiscal acumen is widely respected in Albany and who was a key player in saving New York City from bankruptcy in the 1970s when he was recruited for the task from the private sector.
Ravitch called the Medicaid system unwieldy and said it serves “contradictory goals and provides perverse incentives.”
“As a result, it is ill-equipped to control costs or to benefit from the federal health care reform,” he said.
