"Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?” — Matthew 7:9
Governor Brownback, a man who considers himself someone of significant faith, working to transition to the position of Ambassador to Religious Freedom, may need to learn a few things from the book he professes. The Kansas City Star revealed that the policy in Kansas has left many families struggling to figure out care for their loved ones.
www.kansascity.com/...
Administrators at Villa St. Francis nursing home in Olathe have a checklist of questions before taking in a new resident with a pending Medicaid application.
How many Medicaid-pending residents are we already subsidizing? Is this person likely to survive the months it will probably take for the state of Kansas to approve their application? If not, is there a loved one who is willing to follow through on the application after this person dies?
The situation in Kansas has hit a point where the state seems to be creating a policy of stiffing medical facilities rather than pay on benefits, putting care providers in a difficult position.
Morgan Bell, a social worker at Stormont Vail Hospital in Topeka, told a KanCare legislative oversight committee last month that she was recently looking for a nursing home for a patient who had fallen into a coma.
“It came to my attention that even the couple of facilities that would make exceptions for KanCare-pending applicants are not able to take these patients if they have a limited life expectancy, solely because they will not receive payment if the patient dies before the application is approved,” Bell said.
Kansas has been concerned about this problem for some time, but the concern hasn’t been enough to correct it.
In 2016, the Kansas Health Institute published this look at the situation:
www.khi.org/...
The Medicaid application backlog in Kansas is on its way back up, threatening months of progress on a coverage problem that has vexed health care providers across the state.
For more than a year, providers that rely on Kansas Medicaid, or KanCare, have been stung by delayed payments as they wait months for eligibility determinations that by federal rule are supposed to take no more than 45 days.
Today, more than a thousand Kansans sit, waiting, unsure of end of life or extended placement because of a system clearly in violation of federal rules. There is little risk to Kansas, though, as most observers believe the Trump administration has little interest in forcing compliance with these regulations or invoking any penalties.
Facing problems handling the basic services required, the Brownback administration rolled out Kancare 2.0 for approval this month, and some of the new items are doozies.
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The biggest departures from the past five years are the implementation of work requirements for parents with children ages six and older, as well as a three-year lifetime limit on Medicaid coverage.
About 12,000 parents would be affected by these changes, of Kansas' 420,000 Medicaid enrollees.
"One of my concerns is if that's where we're starting, where are we going to end up?" Weisgrau said.
Per the proposal, a single parent would have to work, participate in job training or community service for a minimum of 20 to 30 hours, and two-parent households would be required to work between 35 and 55 hours. Parents that fail to meet these requirements may become ineligible for coverage until they gain employment.
With a system already boxing out residents, slow to approve applications, and leaving some out in the cold due to delayed payments, the reboot of KanCare is even more punishing; extending to other areas, including work requirements.
This Christmas in Kansas, the elderly wait for placement that may not happen, and the younger who rely on the privatized program may find that they are about to get boxed out.
Nothing says compassion like a system that harms so many.