A new rule recently issued by the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) has exciting implications for support for asthma management. Federal Medicaid regulations now allow for preventive services — including activities like asthma education — to reimbursed and carried out out by asthma educators, healthy homes specialists, or other community health workers, so long as the services have been initially recommended by a physician or other licensed practitioner.
Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program, has to elect to adopt the rule. Until it goes into effect, current Medicaid regulations limit coverage of preventive services to those that are provided by a physician or other licensed practitioner. That’s where you come in. RAMP invites you to sign on to this letter to the Department of Health Care Services. The letter’s goals are two-fold. First, we want to reinforce with DHCS that this rule could serve many different health issues, and that a comprehensive, transparent approach to rule implementation is needed. Second, we want to make the case that asthma fits very well among that range of health issues.
Please show your support by close of business, Tuesday, October 21st, by emailing Joel Ervice, RAMP’s Associate Director, at joel@rampasthma.org/.
For additional background information about the rule, see this policy brief from the Childhood Asthma Leadership Coalition, as well as this PowerPoint presentation that RAMP recently hosted on the subject.