Ohio veterans on Medicaid might have option of VA care


The Columbus Dispatch

The state is taking preliminary steps toward notifying Ohio’s veterans who are currently enrolled in the state’s Medicaid program that they could qualify for a potentially richer set of federal health-care benefits.
An undetermined number of Ohio’s 880,000 veterans are enrolled in Medicaid, and having a formal notification program, as 15 states do, has saved some programs money.
For example, Washington state has avoided spending an estimated $35 million in state Medicaid dollars since 2007 with its program, said Bill Allman, veterans program manager with the Washington State Health Care Authority. The state has directed more than 6,000 veterans there to federal health-care benefit programs.
In some cases, veterans could benefit more from federal health-care coverage than from Medicaid. For example, veterans who are enrolled in long-term care through Medicaid risk having the state place a lien on their home as a means of defraying the cost of that care.
But veterans with at least a 70 percent service-connected disability likely can receive those services free at facilities that are under contract with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs or part of its system, said Allman, who has advocated that other states adopt Washington’s approach.
State officials have been comparing lists of veterans and Medicaid enrollees in Cuyahoga County. They quickly found several nursing-home residents enrolled in Medicaid who are likely eligible for federal health-care benefits, said Greg Moody, the director of Gov. John Kasich’s Office of Health Transformation.
The state is working on automating a process that could quickly identify veterans who are signing up for Medicaid or already enrolled, Moody said. He said the state would like to have the process in place by early 2015. But officials could not say how many Ohio veterans are enrolled in Medicaid and how much money could potentially be saved.
In Washington state, 7 percent of Medicaid enrollees were found to be veterans when that state’s notification program launched, Allman said.
Ohio’s Medicaid program covers 2.4 million people, with 366,000 more newly eligible residents projected to sign up for coverage by June 2015. Nationwide, about 40 percent of the 22.3 million military veterans receive health-care services from the Veterans Health Administration, according to Kaiser Health News.
States that notify veterans typically let them choose whether they want to rely on Medicaid or federal health-care benefits for long-term and other types of health care, Allman said.
The Ohio Department of Veterans Services also favors that approach. “We do not envision this ... as any kind of a situation where any veteran would have to choose a level of care that wasn’t in their best interest,” department spokesman Mike McKinney said.
The department supports efforts to make veterans aware of benefits, McKinney said, but added that a lot of “fine print and details” still need to be worked out. In some cases, he said, it might be in a veteran’s best interest to continue to receive health-care services through Medicaid.
About 26,000 Ohio veterans living below the federal poverty line are not eligible for military-related health benefits but are eligible for Medicaid, Moody said.
Senate Bill 101, introduced last year, would establish a system for identifying individuals enrolled in Medicaid who might be eligible for federal military-related health-care benefits.
The bill would require the state to notify Medicaid-enrolled veterans that they might be eligible for those benefits. It has not yet had a hearing. The bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Dave Burke, a Marysville Republican, did not respond to a message seeking comment.

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