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CRITICAL REHAB OPTION ALERT!! |
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Thursday, 27 September 2007 |
| · CRITICAL REHAB OPTION ALERT!!
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CRITICAL REHAB OPTION ALERT!!!
Senate and House leaders are about to wrap up negotiations on a compromise on SCHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance bill. We are still alive on the Section 814 moratorium that imposes a one-year moratorium to prohibit HHS from taking any action to restrict coverage or payment for rehabilitation services (this will impact NY day services and clinic services), which is attached to the SCHIP bill and extremely important to services in New York. There are only several hours left before they wrap up work on this important issue. Keep in mind, if Medicaid habilitation services currently provided under rehabilitation services state option or clinical services state option are eliminated, your state will have to find other means of financing these important services currently reimbursed by Medicaid for people with mental retardation, developmental disabilities, mental illness, substance abuse, etc.—further crunching already tight state budgets and/or eliminating services currently provided all together.
A Dear Senate Colleague sign on letter (now no longer a draft) is attached and is going in the next two hours. NYSACRA strongly supports this Dear Colleague letter and have added our support for this letter.
The letter urges Senators to include the needed Section 814 one-year moratorium language to stop HHS/CMS changes to rehabilitation/habilitation services through regulation and other activities. Please get your Senators to sign on. The letter goes from our Senators to Senate Chair Baucus (D-MT) and Ranking Member Grassley (R-IA) of the Finance committee and has the following co-signers already:
Sanders
Casey
Salazar
Stabenow
Bingaman
Leahy
Pryor
CONTACT U.S. SENATORS SCHUMER & CLINTON, URGE THEM TO:
Support on this Dear Colleague letter circulating to Senators. It is especially important to contact Republican Senators. We especially want providers in ME, NM, MN and PA to reach out to Senators Snowe (ME), Domenici (NM), Coleman (MN), and Specter (PA). However it is still important to ask Senators Clinton and Schumer to get their Senate colleagues to sign on to Senator Salazar’s Dear Colleague letter to Senators Baucus and Grassley urging them to include Section 814.
SCHUMER: 202-224-6542 CLINTON: 202-224-4451
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