States extend Medicaid family planning services.(Practice Trends)

WASHINGTON -- Twenty-one states have found alternatives to extend eligibility for family planning services while saving money for the Medicaid program, a health policy expert said during a Kaiser Family Foundation briefing on women and Medicaid.

This is encouraging news at a time when everyone's so concerned about budget cuts and, specifically, cuts to Medicaid, Rachel Gold, director of policy analysis at the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a health policy research organization in Washington, said during the briefing.

One-third of all U.S. women of reproductive age who are under the poverty level depend on Medicaid for their health care, putting it "front and center of providing critical reproductive services," Ms. Gold said.

Under one cost-saving approach, 13 of the 21 states have extended Medicaid eligibility for family planning to women based solely on their income. Women who never had any association with Medicaid would be eligible for this benefit, she said.

Seven of the 13 states extended the coverage to men, providing them with access to condoms, testing and diagnosis for sexually transmitted diseases, and vasectomies.

In authorizing these experimental eligibility expansions, the federal government requires that these programs remain budget neutral--"meaning they can't cost the government any more than what it would have spent in the absence of one of these programs," Ms. Gold said.

In a study of six of these income-based Medicaid expansions, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that the programs met the budget neutrality requirement.