Rob Portman: “we are here talking about the budget. One of the issues on the budget is how we spend our money, including on health…”

“we are here talking about the budget. One of the issues on the budget is how we spend our money, including on health care and in this case on some of our most vulnerable young people, our children, who have what are termed to be ``complex medical conditions.'' I appreciate the fact that Senator Bennet is cosponsoring this amendment with me. It is based on some bipartisan legislation we have been working on over the years that helps to ensure that these children have the opportunity to get better care, and also we can save some funds in what is a very inefficient Medicaid delivery system now for these children. It would allow, basically, health care providers to deliver health care services to these medically complex kids through models that coordinate care between providers, again helping to improve quality of care--and much better outcomes in the cases where this has been tried-- but also to lower costs for Medicaid. There are roughly 3 million children who fit in this category. It is about 1 in every 25 children. Of these children, by the way, most of them rely on Medicaid to access care, about 2 million out of the 3 million. Although children with complex conditions represent only about 6 percent of pediatric Medicaid patients, they comprise about 40 percent of the cost, so 6 percent of the kids, about 40 percent of the cost of all Medicaid spending on children.…”