Emily Bazar's blog

Community Dental Services, a managed care dental plan with about 16,000 Medi-Cal members in Sacramento and Los Angeles Counties, will cease operations and transfer its enrollees to Liberty Dental Plan on June 1, state officials announced Friday.

The move came in response to an audit by the Department of Managed Health Care, the results of which can’t be released until it is finalized, said department spokeswoman Marta Bortner.

In our ongoing coverage of Sacramento County’s dental plan for poor kids, we’ve reported on proposals to fix its performance, including a measure in the Legislature that would fundamentally change the way the Medi-Cal program works there.

But there’s another, earlier bill that advocates say would have statewide impact, especially for Californians who live in places where dental treatment is difficult to access.

Even the experts are confused.

At two public hearings this week to discuss problems with Sacramento County’s dental care program for poor kids, not all the expert witnesses agreed on which California counties provide Medi-Cal dental services via managed care.

Let’s start with what they did agree on: Sacramento.

Sacramento has been exclusively a “geographic managed care” county for nearly two decades, debuting as a pilot project in 1994. Under geographic managed care, the state contracts directly with private dental plans, paying them a monthly fee – about $12 – for each Sacramento County Medi-Cal child assigned to them.

California is quietly abandoning a pilot project that would have brought automatic medication dispensers into the homes of thousands of Medi-Cal recipients, saying the experiment would cost more than it would save.

In an analysis of the potential costs, the state Department of Health Care Services determined that the pilot wouldn’t come close to saving the $140 million annually that legislators banked on when they approved it last year. 

“There was a great risk that not only would it not achieve the savings, but it might actually generate costs,” said Norman Williams, DHCS spokesman.

Now the feds are jumping in.

This morning, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced a national campaign to reduce elective deliveries of babies before 39 weeks of pregnancy, saying the effort will improve care and save millions.

Under the “Strong Start” initiative, the government will work with hospitals across the country that have joined the Partnership for Patients, a voluntary effort to reduce preventable injuries and complications.