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Last week in Lansing we heard more about the long-running battle between Medicaid HMOs and mental health organizations over Michigan's $2.4 billion Medicaid behavioral health budget. It's going to be until late in the year before much more is known about how the state will proceed. And that is OK.
On Tuesday, House and Senate leaders stepped into the fray and inserted their suggestions for how to proceed into the state's proposed fiscal 2017 budget. That means the legislators essentially halted, at least for this year, Gov. Rick Snyder's effort to hand over Medicaid behavioral health funding to the health plans.
They also rendered moot Lt. Gov. Brian Calley's self-imposed deadline of mid-May to have a workgroup create replacement language for mental health services for the proposed budget, which begins Oct. 1.