The Health Care Safety Net in a Medicaid Transformation Era

This project will address the relationship of Medicaid and the safety net from two perspectives: 1) specific areas of population/health care focus where core safety-net providers have an important presence, such as women’s health, comprehensive primary care, and care for people living with HIV/AIDS, mental illness, and/or addiction; and 2) cross-cutting functional issues and common challenges for all safety-net providers, such as enrolling people in Medicaid and other coverage challenges, payment issues, and managed care participation. The researchers will address these issues in the following products: an anchor issue brief that lays out the scope of the problem and describes the core safety-net providers, their importance to patients and communities, and the common challenges they face, based on both a literature review and interviews with safety-net provider leaders; and explainers that will address such topics as the role of safety-net providers in Medicaid enrollment, using Medicaid to strengthen care through more comprehensive coverage of services that safety-net providers provide, payment reform options under Medicaid, and marketplace enrollment/renewal and plan coverage and payment issues.