MO Medicaid Cuts: What Not to Do

Missouri, a good model to avoid, cut payment for various Medicaid services recently. The short sighted politicians, in an effort to scrimp on the state budget, decided the state will no longer pay for in-home physical therapy.

As a result, patients who need the therapy to enable them to return to work, cannot get the required treatment at home. However, they can still get the therapy in the hospital.

Hospital stays for some patients in Missouri are now being extended to enable them to get physical therapy. The estimated cost of keeping the patient in the hospital for this treatment is triple the cost of providing the therapy at home.

Gentle readers, in a rational system, such craziness would not be tolerated. But when healthcare decisions are driven by politics and monopoly economics rather than medicine, such oddities are inevitable.