Most state Medicaid programs don’t cover all of the three core behavioral health crisis response services recommended by federal guidelines. Crisis response services play a vital role in alleviating constituencies that have heretofore struggled to address increasing rates of behavioral health crises, notably busy emergency departments and law enforcement. And the evolution of these services […]
Kaiser Family Foundation
The bulk of state Medicaid programs cover services to treat substance use disorders (SUDs) and outpatient services, but few cover crisis care services. That’s according to a new report by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), which included survey responses from 45 states about their health benefits. In the survey, KFF provided state Medicaid officials with […]
New York state hopes to strengthen and remake state-managed behavioral health care by getting around the so-called IMD exclusion. It’s doing so by securing federal Medicaid funds typically forbidden from covering facility-based behavioral health through its latest 1115 waiver amendment. On Jan. 5, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced New York applied […]
State Medicaid programs continue to expand behavioral health benefits, especially for specific high-needs populations. Several states have rolled out new behavioral health benefits or enhanced existing ones. All the while, no states have plans to restrict behavioral health benefits during fiscal year 2023, according to a new survey of state Medicaid leaders from the Kaiser […]
Approximately 130 million Americans live in 5,900 regions designated as having a mental health clinician shortage. New data from the Kaiser Family Foundation shed light on the disparity in mental health clinician shortage between states. At a national level, the United States would require about 6,600 new mental health practitioners to meet the demand in […]
Millions more vulnerable Americans have access to behavioral health services because of a temporary federal edict that helped people get and keep Medicaid coverage. But the days of that edict — the public health emergency — are numbered, putting millions at risk of losing Medicaid and access to health care services. A dramatic administrative change […]
Deaths from substance use disorders (SUDs) continue to reach unfortunate milestones, and fewer places have been hit as hard as California. Now, more help is on the way to the nation’s most populous state, as America’s largest payor of behavioral health services has given the green light for providers to receive more addiction treatment reimbursements. […]
The demand for behavioral health services nationwide these days is strong, with more than half of Americans seeking assistance for themselves or loved ones. However, the supply of clinicians is not keeping up with the demand for services. In California, where a shortage of behavioral health care workers has made national news in recent years, […]
The Trump administration released its proposed budget for fiscal year 2021 Monday. On the behavioral health front, the budget aims to expand and extend the Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic (CCBHC) Medicaid demonstration, significantly boosting funding to that program and a variety of others focused on mental health and the opioid epidemic. It also promises […]
Medicaid expansion could be credited with saving the lives of thousands from opioid overdoses, researchers assert in a new study. In fact, states that adopted Medicaid expansion between 2014 and 2016 recorded fewer opioid-related deaths than states that did not, according to results published by JAMA Network Open. Medicaid expansion was born out of the […]