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Pennsylvania’s Plan to Shift LTC to Managed Care Meets Initial Resistance

June 25, 2015

At the first public meeting to discuss Pennsylvania’s proposed shift toward managed care, attendees expressed confusion and apprehension about the change, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on June 12.

Beginning in 2017, the administration of Gov. Tom Wolf (D) is planning to roll out a long-term care system in which “managed care operators would contract with the state to oversee the health care and supportive social services” for the hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians who are “dual eligible” for both Medicare and Medicaid, the Post-Gazette‘s Gary Rotstein reported.

But at the June 11 meeting in Pittsburgh — the first opportunity Pennsylvanians have had to publicly comment on the plan – some home care consumers, providers, and other stakeholders raised their concerns.

Some stakeholders worried that the home care workforce is not large enough or supported enough by government funding to meet the rising demand for home care in a rebalanced system.

Some consumers, meanwhile, wondered whether they would lose the ability to control the terms of their own care, Rostein wrote.

“When you become disabled, not having choices is something that all of us fear,” Patrick Griffith, a home care consumer with a disability, is quoted as saying in the Post-Gazette. “The scariest thing is that we’re going to be told what we can do.”

— by Matthew Ozga

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