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Cuomo irate as Trump admin cuts Medicaid funds

President Donald Trump and Gov. Andrew Cuomo are fighting over the Green Light Law, and it appears Medicaid subscribers are the ones who will pay the price for it.

“Health care should be beyond politics, and it is unconscionable that the federal administration is politicizing the lives of New Yorkers — primarily senior citizens,” Cuomo said in a press release Tuesday.

On Friday, the federal government denied the state’s request to extend its $8 billion Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment program. Therefore health care organizations across the state are expected to miss out on $625 million in funds to help Medicaid patients.

First established in 2014, DSRIP’s goal was to put federal funds toward preventative health care to reduce avoidable hospital use among Medicaid subscribers by 25% over five years. DSRIP ends March 31.

The idea was to steer patients away from visiting hospitals and getting services that don’t help or aren’t necessary.

For example, a woman might go into an emergency department with abdominal pain, but it turns out to just be menstrual cramps and she’s given an over-the-counter pain reliever. However, she still has to pay the bill for the hospital visit. A smoker might be prescribed an inhaler for respiratory problems, but that doesn’t fix the person’s addiction issues or prevent further hospital visits.

According to a December 2019 Medicaid Administration report from the state Department of Health, “As of October 2018, NY State of Health has determined 3.2 million individuals eligible for Medicaid.” That was a 13% increase from 2017, the report says.

The Adirondack Health Institute, headquartered in Glens Falls, is a nonprofit organization that supports patients and health care providers in the North Country. The federal government’s denial is expected to remove $20,930,831 in DSRIP funds to the AHI.

The AHI has 11 DSRIP projects, some of which include strengthening mental health and substance abuse treatment, and creating a program that would ensure safe, healthy living among recently discharged nursing home patients.

AHI CEO Eric Burton said it’s disappointing DSRIP will not continue, but his group expected this to happen.

“We always knew it was a time-limited program, and the extension for renewal was not a guarantee,” he said in a phone interview Tuesday.

The Green Light Law, which the state Legislature approved in June 2019, allows undocumented immigrants living in New York to apply for driver’s licenses, an initiative that goes against Trump’s crackdown on immigration. Recently, Cuomo and Trump met at the White House to negotiate the law but didn’t come to an agreement.

Cuomo said Trump’s denial to extend DSRIP is just the latest in a series of “attacks on New York,” along with refusing to allow congestion pricing to fund the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, failing to manage Lake Ontario flooding and denying Federal Emergency Management Agency support following a Halloween storm in the Mohawk Valley and southern Adirondacks.

“Make no mistake: New York will marshal all our allies, including our congressional delegation, to fight these cuts tooth and nail until New York receives the full funding we deserve,” he said in the press release.

AHI’s Burton said it’s unclear what impact will come from not extending the DSRIP program.

“It’s funding that the region would have continued to utilize,” he said, “but at the same time we will move forward with our goals.”

Burton said DSRIP initiatives proved successful across the state and in the North Country.

“We’ve seen decreases in unnecessary (hospital) visits and unnecessary re-admissions,” he said.

Adirondack Health, a separate entity that operates medical facilities in the Tri-Lakes area, expressed a similar sentiment.

“Like every hospital and health system in New York state, Adirondack Health is in the process of calculating what impact the recent DSRIP denial will have on our operating margins in the months and years to come,” spokesperson Matt Scollin­ said in an email statement. “But regardless of the dollar amount, the DSRIP program encouraged innovation and outside-the-box thinking, both of which are central components of sustainable rural health care.”

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