[NYAPRS Enews] TU Editorial: Cuomo Should Open Up Medicaid Redesign Process

[Harvey Rosenthal]

Fix Medicaid, In Public View

Albany Times Union Editorial  January 12, 2011 

Page 1 of 1

We were thrilled to hear Governor Cuomo say in his State of the State
address last week that New York finally is ready to get the cost of
Medicaid under control.

No longer would the best solution the state can come up with be a simple
readjustment of rates. Mr. Cuomo instead has recruited the former
Medicaid director of Wisconsin to come here to overhaul the health
insurance program for the poor and the disabled.

Hearing even that much had us eager to learn more details of a
government reinvention effort that's as daunting as it is crucial to the
task of saving the state from lurching from one fiscal crisis to
another.

Same for Mr. Cuomo's executive order creating a panel to reduce the
burden of all those state mandates on local governments and school
districts.

Then came Friday, just two days after the governor's speech.

Mr. Cuomo's Medicaid Redesign Team met for the first time. So did the
Mandate Relief Redesign Team. They met, that is, in private.

How odd, just a week into an administration we thought was so committed
to open government and changing the political culture that prevails at
the Capitol.

The word from the governor's office is that meetings of these panels
will be open only on occasion. But why not make publicly accessible
sessions the norm, going into closed session only in the relatively rare
-- or so we'd think -- circumstances that demanded as much?

Surely that would be consistent with the website,
http://governor.ny.gov/medicaidredesign, that Mr. Cuomo's office has
launched to keep the public informed about the Medicaid panel and to
invite its input. 

What is achieved by doing the public's business in private?

The dialogue during the Medicaid panel's sessions could be especially
intriguing. The public that pays, to the tune of $53 billion a year, for
the most expensive Medicaid program of any state in the country might
find it instructive, even occasionally fascinating, to hear the varied
and divergent views of its members. 

Where's the harm in letting New Yorkers know what the members --
including co-chairmen Dennis Rivera, a leader of the huge health care
workers union, SEIU, and Michael Dowling, president of North Shore LIJ
Health system -- see as the best way out of the Medicaid mess?

Where's the harm in letting citizens -- those who use Medicaid and those
who pay for it -- hear the many special interests on the panel debate
why this service must go or that one must stay?

Two final, albeit similar, pieces of advice for the governor and his
closest advisers, First, take careful note of the concerns raised
already by Lara Kassel, coordinator of Medicaid Matters, the one
consumer representative on the panel. She fears the repercussions of
shutting out the public.

Second, Mr. Cuomo should recall what happened when his then-boss,
President Clinton, tried to address the economics and politics of health
care. His approach was to let his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Ira
Magaziner, a friend from their days together as Rhodes Scholars, try to
develop a health care reform plan largely free of public input and
outside scrutiny.

The result, of course, was the sort of disaster that Mr. Cuomo can ill
afford.

The issue:          Two of Governor Cuomo's panels to address New York's
crises meet in private. 

The Stakes:        What about those promises of open government?

 

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