Medicaid Redesign Team (MRT) II

The FY 2021 Budget reconstitutes the MRT, bringing stakeholders who bring experience as health care providers back to the table to find solutions that will once again contain spending growth so that this critical program that provides health care to more than 6 million New Yorkers remains financially sustainable for the future.

The reconstituted Team will commence its work immediately and hold its first public meeting on Tuesday, February 11th. The Team will submit its report with findings and recommendations to the Governor and Legislature in March for consideration in the Fiscal Year 2021 Enacted Budget.

In addition, The MRT II will create an advisory Work Group to focus on issues associated with long-term care. Enrollment and spending in managed long-term care has accelerated dramatically over the last three years. Understanding the causes of this growth and identifying efficiencies within the program is an important priority of MRT II.

The MRT II will be charged with accelerating the strategies of MRT I that have proved successful for the last nine years while creating course corrections in order to restore financial sustainability to the Medicaid program. MRT II is charged with putting forth a plan that achieves $2.5 billion in State Medicaid savings in FY 21. The MRT II recommendations should address:

• the drivers of greater-than-projected costs and growth in the Medicaid program;
• models of healthcare delivery to improve care management for beneficiaries with complex health conditions;
• existing regulations, laws and programs that hinder the modernization or achieving efficiencies in the Medicaid program and for the healthcare industry;
• ways to ensure the availability of a stable and appropriately skilled workforce, especially with respect to meeting the needs of an aging population;
• strengthening the sustainability of safety net providers serving vulnerable populations, including through regulatory reform;
• changes in the Medicaid program to achieve short-term solutions and long-term systemic changes that advance the State´s successful healthcare reform strategy while restoring financial sustainability to ensure that benefits will always be available to those who need it;
• whether any changes to the metric for calculating the Medicaid global cap are necessary;
• the introduction of new data sets, data analytics and technologies to identify current and future trends and improve program oversight, and
• policies to ensure the efficient and effective use of Medicaid dollars and reduce waste, fraud and abuse.