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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Idaho Has Failed To Tap Federal Funds, Study Says Schools Have Not Applied For Medicaid For Education Of Poor, Disabled Kids

Associated Press

Since 1988, millions of state and local tax dollars have been unnecessarily diverted from basic education services to the special education of disabled poor children that the federal government would have paid, legislative evaluators said Monday.

And a Batt administration official acknowledged that and other failures to take advantage of federal matching funds will limit the state’s allocation if Congress turns the Medicaid program back to the states on a block grant basis.

The evaluation of Medicaid services found that only five of the 112 school districts billed the federal government for its more than two-thirds share of the cost providing those special services to disabled poor children. Those five recovered just $62,000 of the estimated $1 million the federal government should have paid through Medicaid for those federally mandated services during the last school year alone.

Instead, the school districts paid the special services bills from their own budgets, 75 percent of which are financed by the state.

But Gov. Phil Batt, in his written response to the evaluation presented to the Legislative Oversight Committee, defended what he called the state’s prudent approach to the Medicaid program - one that refused to tap federal money just because it was available.

Batt also said the school districts had the opportunity to take advantage of the federal cash and most declined.

“I suspect many school officials would tell you they did not want to go through the paperwork, the regulation and so forth,” Batt wrote, “and that..th. they concluded that the extra work was not worth the extra money.”

The failure to take advantage of the federal matching money was the most striking finding of the evaluation, which said the state could have picked up another $1 million a year in federal money for other state or federally mandated Medicaid services it is either already paying the full cost of or is providing even more expensive alternatives.

Those include reducing regulations in the Personal Care Services program, expanding home or community-based services to disabled children as the state already has for adults and transferring poor children now in expensive care facilities to home or community-based care.

Performance Evaluations Administrator Nancy Van Maren acknowledged that a congressional action to make Medicaid a state-run program on a federal block grant would affect some of the recommendations.

“This rationale,” countered Medicaid Administrator Tresa Newman, “does not acknowledge that federal money and state money originate from the same taxpayers. Taxpayers lose when states behave as if someone else were paying the bills.”