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LSO presents Health and Welfare budget review; Medicaid costs, hospital assessment and MMIS highlighted
Summary
Legislative Services Office analyst Alex Williamson briefed the Senate Health and Welfare Committee on the Department of Health and Welfare budget, noting recent Medicaid-driven spending increases, work on a Medicaid MMIS procurement and an organizational reorganization that renames and redistributes several divisions.
Alex Williamson, budget and policy analyst with the Legislative Services Office, summarized the Department of Health and Welfare's recent spending trends, midyear supplemental requests and the governor's fiscal 2026 recommendations. "This is the agency budget review for the Department of Health and Welfare," Williamson said at the start of her presentation.
Williamson noted a sharp increase in appropriations from fiscal 2022 to 2023 driven largely by Medicaid population and cost changes and by adjustments tied to the hospital assessment and upper payment limit calculations. "About two thirds of that came from changes to Medicaid," she said, describing a roughly $670 million increase from the prior year as driven primarily by Medicaid adjustments. She explained the hospital assessment and upper payment limit changes permit hospitals to draw more federal dollars and that hospitals provide…
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