Winneshiek Medical Center tries to cope with Iowa's Medicaid program

Winneshiek Medical Center continues to be affected by changes in Iowa's Medicaid program.

When the state legislature turned over the supervision of Medicaid in Iowa to three private companies, the cost of managing the$6.4 billion program in Iowa went up—and is now over $500 million, twice as much as when Medicaid was managed by the state.

In response, the managed care organizations have created cost containment strategies.  Winneshiek Medical Center Chief Financial Officer Lynn Luloff says those strategies have had "a significant and negative impact" on Iowa hospitals and the patients they serve.

There are now just two Managed Care Organizations in Iowa—Amerigroup and United HealthCare—after AmeriHealth Caritas left the program as of December 1st.  Then Amerigroup announced it would continue to serve its current members, but would not take new members, meaning the 215,000 Iowa Medicaid recipients which had been managed by AmeriHealth Caritas were assigned to United Health Care.  That has left United Health Care with the job of managing most of the accounts of Iowa's 700,000 Medicaid patients.