From the Lawrence [KS] Journal-World, WDAF Kansas City, KWCH-TV Kansas City:

Kansas disability rights advocates pleaded with state lawmakers to roll back a planned 10 percent cut in Medicaid funding, saying that the $22.7 million reduction would put the lives of vulnerable people at risk.

At a Capitol news conference Friday, advocates said the proposed cuts would end up costing more because they would force the state to place people in more expensive nursing homes.

“It’s just mind-boggling that we would cut those services only to force people into institutions which are going to cost taxpayers more dollars,” said Rocky Nichols, executive director of the Disability Rights Center of Kansas.

He said policymakers don’t understand that the cuts “are real and are devastating people’s lives, and without restoring those cuts, it’s only going to get worse.”

From UPI:

A new study in the journal Pediatrics (free article) found that the financial impact of raising a child with a disability varies widely between states, depending on each state’s Medicaid and State Children’s Health Insurance Program. The study also found that low income families spend a disproportionally large share of their income on their child’s care.

“Policy makers should consider ways to strengthen Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to reduce the financial burdens these families shoulder,” said Paul Shattuck, a professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis and one of the study’s authors.

See also:

Wide variation in state Medicaid and SCHIP policies determine financial burden for low-income families with special health care needs children (with video) — Washington University in St. Louis News and Information

From the New York Times:

Enrollment in Medicaid is climbing to record highs, prompting grave concerns among the states about the future of the government health insurance for poor people and those with disabilities, according to a survey released Wednesday.

An annual survey of state Medicaid directors, conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, found enrollment growing by an average of 5.4 percent in the previous fiscal year, the highest rate in six years. Eight states reported increases of more than ten percent.

… state officials are already panicking about how to compensate when the spike in federal matching funds expires at the end of 2010. Few anticipate any significant reduction in their Medicaid rolls by then.

“Many states believe they may be pressured to consider previously unthinkable eligibility and benefit reductions,” the Kaiser report concluded. Unless Congress and President Obama extend the federal aid, the cuts needed to balance state budgets may be “on a scale not ever seen in Medicaid,” the authors warned.

“What we will have to look at is wholesale elimination of eligibility groups,” [said a Nevada official.]

From the Omaha World-Herald:

Nebraska’s troubled Beatrice State Developmental Center has moved a step closer to losing $25 million a year in federal Medicaid funds. The state has received word that its appeal of Medicaid decertification has been denied.

The Beatrice Center’s funding has been in jeopardy since September 2006, when it failed seven of eight federal standards and received two federal citations for problems that endangered residents. Earlier this year, state inspectors found that problems at the center had led to the death of an 18-year-old woman.

The center, which cares for about 185 people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, has also been cited by the U.S. Justice Department, which found that its practices had violated residents’ constitutional and legal rights.

Earlier posts here.

From the New York Times:

A growing number of states are teaming up with Medicaid to help elderly people and those with disabilities move out of nursing homes and back into their communities.

Walter Brown, 72, says the transition to his own home has dramatically improved his life. Brown, who had a stroke two years ago, said living in a nursing home was “like being in jail.” Now he says he is “more confident in my future.”

The new programs in 29 states are a sharp departure from past practices, in which Medicaid practically steered people into nursing homes. Each participating state has designed its own program, called Money Follows the Person. The federal government provides extra funding for the first year.

“Medicaid has had an institutional bias in favor of nursing homes,” even for people who do not need them, said Gene Coffey, a staff lawyer at the nonprofit National Senior Citizens Law Center. “Federal law requires states to provide nursing home services. They don’t have to provide home or community-based services.”

(Photo from the New York Times)

From the New York Times:

People with speech disabilities question why Medicare and private insurers are declining to cover mainstream devices like iPhones and netbook PCs that can help them communicate.

Insurers say coverage is restricted to medical devices, not gadgets that can also be used for nonmedical purposes like playing video games or browsing the Internet. Consequently, they are limiting coverage  to dedicated, proprietary devices that cost 10 to 20 times more and can do far less.

Kara Lynn uses a $300 Apple iPhone 3G running $150 text-to-speech software, which serves her better than the $8,000 Medicare-approved computer that she used previously.

For Ms. Lynn, the iPhone, with the special software, is cheaper, more effective and essential. “Technology has become as important to me as air, food, water,” she wrote.

By Barbara Shelly in the Kansas City Star:

Hundreds of people with developmental disabilities in Kansas are waiting years after completing high school to get a job or placement in a sheltered workshop.

The problem is so pervasive that advocates have a term for it — graduating to the living room. The state invests millions of dollars in public school special education programs, and then leaves the graduates to languish at home.

Emily Thomas, who has multiple physical and intellectual disabilities, has been idling at home for four years without a place to go or a purpose to her days. Her mother worries that the state’s neglect has left Emily isolated, and deprived her of the opportunity to have friends outside her family.

Helping Kansans like Emily lead a productive life is a state responsibility — one that lawmakers and governors have largely shirked for a decade.