LA. MEDICAID CONTRACTS EXTENDED -- Gov. John Bel Edwards has won legislative backing for $15.4 billion dollars in Medicaid managed-care contract extensions that House Republicans had blocked multiple times in prior votes. At thefourth hearing of the Legislature's joint budget committee on the deals last week, lawmakers approved the extensions without a single objection. Appropriations Chairman Cameron Henry, the House Republican who led the original opposition, seemed to claim victory for the process. Henry said, " Overall, what we were able to do by not agreeing right away with what you all wanted to do, is just to put some language in the contracts that makes everybody feel, he taxpayers feel, a little bit better than we did before. And we allowed the process to work. We might not have gotten everything that we wanted, but we have more than what we originally started.We didn't rubber stamp it — we just allowed the process that we have in place to work. So for the future contracts, I would assume we're going to again continue to allow the process to work."
The extensions will keep in place five companies that manage care for 1.5 million Louisiana Medicaid patients. The current contracts were set to expire Jan. 31. Gov. Edwards had planned to enact the deals through an emergency process if lawmakers didn't reverse their opposition, a plan that provoked legislative criticism.
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