This week, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released a Medicaid scorecard intended to show how the nation’s largest health program is performing.
CMS publically tracks the performance of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) through a scorecard that ranks states on a range of quality measures and displays data that indicates how well those programs are performing. The federal site consolidates data submitted by states into a single location and also tracks CMS’s performance on select metrics, like how long it takes the agency to review waiver applications.
CMS administrator Seema Verma recently commented on the data explaining, “This is about bringing a level of transparency and accountability to the Medicaid program that we have never had before.” She declined to discuss the findings in any detail or comment on any individual states that performed poorly or exceptionally.
Medicaid covers approximately 75 million people nationwide, about half of them children. South Dakota’s Medicaid program covers nearly 120,000 residents.
The CMS scorecard has received low marks from the National Association of Medicaid Directors (NAMD), which criticized it for rating states without accounting for differences in their Medicaid populations. NAMD recently released a statement, suggesting several areas for improvement aimed at addressing the fundamental variances in the scorecard.
Some states do not report data for all measures. Click here to view information specific to South Dakota.
