CREDIT FILE PHOTO
By ANDY MARSO
As Kansas lawmakers plan hearings related to last week’s federal decision to deny a one-year extension of the state’s privatized Medicaid program, Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer says officials are addressing the issues that federal regulators cited.
Colyer still says he thinks politics played a role in the decision, which came in the final days of Barack Obama’s presidency.
But hours after returning from the inauguration of President Donald Trump, he said in a phone interview Saturday that the state will resolve regulators’ concerns with KanCare, which provides health coverage to more than 425,000 Kansans.
“We always want to comply with the federal rules, and there have been a number of discussions that have gone on with them,” Colyer said. “But we believe that we can address any of these issues and are happy to do so.”
Officials with the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services gave Kansas until mid-February to submit a plan to solve compliance issues, which included a lack of reliable data on the provider networks maintained by the three private insurance companies that administer KanCare.
Colyer said he could not personally vouch for the accuracy of the network data.
He left that to leaders of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.
“I’m not the expert on that,” Colyer said. “The policy of the state of Kansas is we want to make sure that we do have an excellent network and if there are concerns, of course we want to deal with them.”
Sen. Vicki Schmidt, chairwoman of the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee, has asked KDHE Secretary Susan Mosier to answer questions about the KanCare extension denial at a hearing Monday morning.
The House Health and Human Services Committee is also scheduled to hear a bill Monday afternoon that would establish an independent inspector general within the Kansas Attorney General’s Office to oversee the KanCare companies.
Colyer said the state will meet the current deadline for a corrective action plan and continue to plan for a one-year extension of the KanCare program.
Then he and the rest of the Brownback administration will begin writing new Medicaid contracts — with added flexibility he predicted the Trump administration would write into Medicaid.
“Everybody needs to recognize that there is a major change underway in Washington, D.C., and we will work with the existing staff and the new staff as they go on,” Colyer said.
Andy Marso is a reporter for kcur.org‘s Kansas News Service, a collaboration of KCUR, Kansas Public Radio and KMUW covering health, education and politics in Kansas. You can reach him on Twitter @andymarso.
