Taps Starts Online Petition on MPT Options

If you are a Medicaid client who depends on public transportation, this issue concerns you.
What can you do, as a Medicaid recipient or interested party?
At this very moment, state officials are considering how non-emergency medical Medicaid trips are going to be delivered to clients. And we believe the model the commission prefers is a flawed one.
If you, or anyone you know, uses public transportation to get to Medicaid medical appointments, you need to know the facts.
Through a series of public meetings, the Texas State Health and Human Services Commission’s Medical Transportation Program, is outlining five models.
The current model —Full-Risk Broker— in place since July of this year, cut 75% of funding to TAPS and denied it the opportunity to provide local service to Medicaid clients in its own communities.
TAPS Public Transit supports model options (3) and (4) as being presented by HHSC. (Learn more here.)

MEDICAID NON-EMERGENCY MEDICAL TRANSPORTATION

no	MODEL	SUPPORT?
1	Full-Risk Broker Expansion	NO
2	Managed Care Carve-in	NO
3	Transportation Service Area Provider Enhancement	YES
4	Regional Transportation Partnership	YES
5	Hybrid Model	NO

What’s wrong with the Full-Risk Broker model?
A change in how your Medicaid Non-Emergency Medical trip, is assigned and paid for, has sidestepped local government and community supported transit agencies —like TAPS Public Transit, a regional provider— that have delivered superior service to Medicaid clients for the past 26 years.
Since summer, contracts with brokers like LogistiCare (a public company) and Irving Holdings LLC (a privately-held company), has led to a serious decline in the quality of service to Medicaid clients. These companies’ prime motivation is profits over service.
Nearly 7,000 complaints filed in the Dallas area alone

You may have seen the investigative news reports on the Dallas-area television station KDFX Fox 4 News, or read about the controversy in the newspapers that focuses on LogistiCare, a full-risk broker covering the Dallas and Fort Worth area. A lot of people are very upset about changes made to how trips are assigned to clients. And there has been a series of hearings to find out exactly what is going on, and what can be done to fix the many problems that have developed.