- June 20, 2021
- Posted by: Stratford Team
- Category: Business
Medicaid payments are like starvation wages for doctors and hospitals.
But to insurers, the government-paid health insurance for low-income families is a feast worth fighting over.
Pennsylvania is trying for the third time since 2015 to replace its Medicaid contracts — worth a total of $65 billion over the last five years — with companies that manage physical health benefits for 2.6 million Pennsylvanians.
Each time, losing bidders have protested, alleging improprieties in the way the state picked winners. Twice, in 2016 and 2018, Commonwealth Court judges agreed. The current protests against the winners announced last summer are pending in the same court.
“The plans see this as really big business,” said Katherine Hempstead, a senior policy adviser at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation’s largest health philanthropy, in Princeton. That’s why they protest every loss nationwide, though the length of the protests in Pennsylvania may be…
