This year's state budget came with a hidden asterisk: In the final throes of his negotiations with legislative leaders, Governor Cuomo quietly postponed a month's worth of Medicaid payments from the last week of March to the first week of April – shifting $1.7 billion in spending from one fiscal year to the next. Read More
Governor Cuomo's efforts to reduce maternal mortality have put New York's doulas on the path to state regulation – and some of them want to get off. Read More
The new state budget features a larger-than-usual increase in Medicaid spending and two new coverage mandates for private insurers – adding to the already steep costs of health care for New York's taxpayers and policyholders. Read More
Bill Hammond, director of health policy at the Empire Center for Public Policy, said that the state has legitimate reasons for improving the way the home-care program is run and reeling in its fiscal intermediaries. Read More
New York’s hospitals are in the throes of two seemingly contradictory trends. Their collective revenues are showing strong growth, yet more and more of them are chronically operating in the red. Read More
Governor Cuomo is now backing away from Medicaid spending cuts he pushed less than four weeks ago, his second about-face on health-care funding so far this year. Even more head-spinning is his stated rationale: the supposed threat to federal aid outlined in President Trump's budget proposal this week. Read More
As part of his 30-day amendments to the budget, the governor set a cap on how much charity-care funding profitable downstate hospitals can receive. Facilities in New York City, Long Island and Westchester that earn—or are part of a system that earns—at least $68 million in operating income or have an operating margin of at least 2.98% would be capped at $10,000 in indigent-care payments. The move would save $138 million in state funding, leaving $719 million, wrote Bill Hammond, director of health policy at the Empire Center, in an analysis of the health budget Friday. Read More
Some of the heated attacks on Governor Cuomo's Medicaid cuts, including a claim that tens of thousands of jobs would be lost, should be taken with a grain of salt. Read More