MEDICARE ANNOUNCES FUNDING FOR STATE HEALTH INSURANCE COUNSELING PROGRAMS FOR 2010

$41.6 MILLION TO HELP BENEFICIARIES LEARN ABOUT MEDICARE

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) today announced that nearly $41.6 million for grant funding will be distributed to State Health Insurance Assistance Programs (SHIPs) on April 1, 2010, to help people with Medicare get more information about their health choices. These grants are available to the 54 existing SHIP organizations in the United States and its territories. The funding is available to SHIPs for the grant year starting April 1, 2010 and ending March 31, 2011.

These grants are the first of two rounds of funding to be distributed to SHIPs in FY 2010. Approximately $1.5 million in performance grants will be distributed to SHIPs in September. CMS intends for the SHIPs to use the FY 2010 funding to continue to expand and provide one-on-one counseling and community-based outreach to all beneficiaries.

In particular, SHIPs will be focusing their efforts to target people with limited incomes, beneficiaries with disabilities, and members of diverse racial and ethnic groups, particularly those individuals with limited English proficiency. Through their grant application submissions, several SHIPs presented plans for expanding their outreach activities to reach more American Indian and Hispanic populations.

"Over the past twenty years, the faces of our Medicare beneficiaries have changed, representing more diverse groups with diverse needs," said Teresa Ni�o, director of CMS' Office of External Affairs. "The way we identify these diverse groups and meet their needs must also change and the SHIPs are best positioned to reach them in the communities where they live."

CMS has established goals that will help to ensure consistency in access to services from SHIPs by Medicare beneficiaries and in the quality of the information and educational activities available to them. For 2010, CMS has implemented new performance measures and benchmarking methods to better evaluate the quality of SHIPs' services. The new approaches improve the methods for comparing SHIPs across the country based on geographic similarities. Additionally, there is an opportunity for a SHIP to see how it has improved over prior years, and be rewarded for improvement.

CMS will continue to support the SHIPs with training and technical assistance. This will help to ensure that the community networks remain fully capable of accessing and using CMS' 1-800-MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227) telephone information line and regional office resources, as well as the online tools at www.medicare.gov and www.SHIPtalk.org to provide assistance to Medicare beneficiaries.

 

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