(AP) — Louisiana’s health department is considering cutting millions of dollars paid to private health care providers for Medicaid patients, to help balance next year’s budget, the department’s finance chief said Monday.Charles Castille, undersecretary for the state Department of Health and Hospitals, said the idea was to drop Medicaid spending for the private providers — like hospitals, nursing homes, doctors and home health care firms — to the amount spent on them in 2006, before lawmakers passed a hefty boost to their payments in 2007.”That was the year the Medicaid program exploded,” Castille said. “So, the idea was, ‘Should we go back to the level before the explosion?'”The move could cut more than $232 million annually in the Medicaid program for the poor, elderly and disabled. When federal matching dollars are left out, Castille said the cuts would save about $33 million in state general fund revenue.Louisiana’s Medicaid program had a $5.2 billion budget before Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. Today, that program has a $6.4 billion budget, because of increases in provider rates, program expansions and increased Medicaid use by state residents, Castille said.Castille described the proposal to an advisory panel to the Commission on Streamlining Government, which is looking at ways to reduce government spending amid several years of projected budget shortfalls.After the meeting, DHH Secretary Alan Levine said the idea was one of many suggestions his department offered to the streamlining commission. But Levine said he hasn’t settled on which suggestions he’ll push with lawmakers when they craft the budget in the spring for the new year that begins July 1.Lobbyists for the hospitals, nursing homes and others whose payments would be slashed said the reductions could jeopardize patient care and might shrink the number of providers willing to care for Medicaid patients.Paul Salles, CEO of the Metropolitan Hospital Council of New Orleans, said a round of cuts this year to private health providers in the Medicaid program brought the rates paid to private and community hospitals for taking care of Medicaid patients to 1997 levels. Rural hospitals weren’t cut.
 
 
 
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