Overview

Mark R. Meiners, Ph.D., Director

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) estimates that there are 6.2 million people in the U.S. that are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid. Since many in this group have complex medical and chronic care needs that require lengthy stays in a variety of long-term care settings, states are increasing their efforts to integrate Medicare's acute benefits with Medicaid's long-term care benefits to provide better services for these dually eligible beneficiaries.

Effective care management for such a population can best be accomplished when health plans have the ability to coordinate the service delivery and financing of the entire continuum of health and long-term care services. In 1996, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) responded to this need by establishing the Medicare/Medicaid Integration Program (MMIP), an $8 million grant initiative. The purpose of MMIP is to end the fragmentation of financing, case management, and service delivery that currently exists between Medicare and Medicaid.

States are provided with both grant funding from RWJF and technical assistance from UMCA as they restructure the way in which they finance and deliver acute and long-term care. Building on the experience of previous Foundation grants such as the Program of All-inclusive Care for Elderly (PACE), the MMIP assists state Medicaid programs to develop and implement integrated care programs.

RWJF provided grants of up to $300,000 to states to develop programs which will coordinate benefits for individuals eligible for both Medicare's acute care services and Medicaid's long-term care services. RWJF awarded grants to Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, the New England Consortium, New York, Oregon, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin.

The National Program Office (NPO) for MMIP, provides technical assistance to state governments. The technical assistance reports and press releases are available on the MMIP website.