The Alliance for Children and Families and United Neighborhood Centers of America 2009 Public Policy Agenda includes health care reform and behavioral health as top-tier policy issues. Based on their timeliness and impact on member organizations, the Public Policy Committee has selected eight priorities for our work on these Tier 1 policy issues in 2009. The eight priorities fall into four “buckets:”
1. Protecting Medicaid funding for therapeutic foster care and therapeutic residential services.
- Support establishing therapeutic foster care as a category of Medicaid-reimbursable services
- Support defining “rehabilitative” care as care for the restoration, attainment, and maintenance of functioning
- Support allowing states to have flexibility in determining their payment methodologies for rehabilitative care and targeted case management
See an update on therapeutic foster care.
2. Improving children’s access to health services, especially dentistry and mental health.
- Support requiring the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission to specifically evaluate Medicaid enrollees’ access to mental/behavioral health and dental health services
- Support requiring states to develop ways to raise Medicaid reimbursement in fields where payments are determined to be too low
- Support requiring states to raise Medicaid reimbursement to at least parity with Medicare
See an update on MACPAC implementation.
See an update on raising Medicaid reimbursement to parity with Medicare.
3. Promoting the use of health information technology to improve children’s health.
- Support funding for grants to states for demonstration projects aimed at transforming the delivery of health care for foster children through the adoption of electronic health records
4. Repealing the prohibition on Medicaid reimbursement for institutes for mental disease (IMD).
- Support repealing or rolling back the exclusion that prohibits federal financial support for institutes for mental disease
See an update on partially rolling back the IMD exclusion.