This should cut the number of medical services provided and kill off expensive PWD....
The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2019 budget request signals that the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) intends to use regulatory authority to allow states to drop the Medicaid non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) benefit. This benefit has been part of Medicaid since the program’s inception in 1966. Changing that would be a stunning precedent, reversing more than 50 years of Medicaid policy.
Many low-income individuals do not have access to affordable transportation to get to and from medical appointments. For them, transportation issues can be a major barrier to needed health care. The requirement for states to provide NEMT benefits in Medicaid was established based on the premise that the Medicaid entitlement is meaningless if patients are unable to get to and from their necessary health care appointments. That premise has not changed.
In 2013, a systematic literature search of peer-reviewed studies on transportation barriers to health care access concluded that transportation barriers to access are common and greater for low-income and chronically ill patients. Two peer-reviewed studies reported that 25 percent of patients missed an appointment due to transportation problems, and 25 separate studies found that 10–51 percent of patients reported transportation was a barrier to health care access.
Information from the largest manager of Medicaid NEMT services indicates that the most frequently cited reasons for using NEMT are accessing behavioral health services (including mental health and substance abuse treatment), dialysis, preventive services (including doctor visits), specialist visits, physical therapy/rehabilitation, and adult day health care services (see Exhibit 1).