NEW YORK, Oct. 3 (UPI) -- U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt has approved a five-year, $3 billion Medicaid experiment in New York state.
The focus of the experiment, the agency said Tuesday, will be on encouraging low-income elderly and disabled Medicaid beneficiaries to use more in-home and community-based care and rely less on hospitals and nursing homes.
The traditional delivery system, which emphasizes inpatient hospital and nursing-home care, is expensive, inflexible and often not oriented to patient needs, HHS said.
The goal of the changes is to increase patient satisfaction, eliminate waste and improve the economic viability of New York's Medicaid program, which currently covers about 4 million individuals with a cost to the state and federal governments of $43 billion.
The program, called the Federal-State Health Reform Partnership, will run through 2011 and will be partially financed through savings from reduced use of costly inpatient healthcare services and improved health resulting from more coordinated care, said Mark McClellan, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
