New director of the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare Alex Adams issued three new bulletins today, each intended to move the department toward more transparency and accountability.
Bulletin 2024-11 calls for strengthening the eligibility verification system for Medicaid beneficiaries. Federal mandates during the Covid emergency made it all but impossible to take people off the Medicaid rolls, but now that those restrictions have been lifted it is imperative to make sure that only eligible people are taking advantage of Medicaid benefits. This report will be due in December.
Bulletin 2024-12 deals with federal grants. It notes that IDHW currently manages 118 different federal grants which total nearly $4 billion in expenditures. Much of this is related to Medicaid, but there are many smaller grants interspersed as well.
The bulletin calls on IDHW staff to prepare a comprehensive report regarding each grant, showing how much it brings in, the costs to the state and the department to manage it, and what federal regulations are attached. This report is due in October.
Finally, Bulletin 2024-13 is titled “Unwinding Delegation to Reduce the Administrative State.” This instructs staff to prepare five bills for the 2025 legislative session that transfer IDHW rules into state statue, which will have the effect of returning legal authority to the Legislature where it belongs rather than retaining it in a state bureaucracy. The bulletin references House Bill 563, which was signed into law earlier this year. This bill modified the existing eight year review period for all agency rules by mandating each agency explain the necessity of each rule, putting the burden on the bureaucracy to justify those rules to the Legislature. The due date for this endeavor is September.
These three bulletins follow last week’s executive order from Gov. Brad Little designed to reduce barriers to adoption and foster care and to take steps to keep children with parents or close kin if at all possible.
Feature image by Idaho Reports
