December 8, 2025
CARVE OUT CAMPAIGN
On Friday the Albany Times Union published an OpEd submitted by the NYS Council re: the need for our services to be carved out of Medicaid managed care. We sent it to all members last week. The good news? City & State picked it up and ran it on the front page of Friday’s City & State First Read sheet:
* Removing community-based mental health and addiction services from New York’s Medicaid managed-care program will save the state money and improve care, Lauri Cole, executive director of the New York State Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare, writes for the Times Union.
And on Sunday, Empire Report posted a link to the OpEd near the top of its daily news brief read by politicians, lawmakers and state leaders on a daily basis (image attached):
LAURI COLE: Managed care for Medicaid’s behavioral health services has been a disaster
Screenshot attached.
Empire Report also Tweeted: https://x.com/EMPIREREPORTNY/status/1997499456812646843
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DoH on Hepatitis B Vaccine
President Trump has directed top health officials to reassess all U.S. childhood vaccine recommendations and compare them with practices in other developed countries, a move reinforcing Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine advisory panel, which just voted to end the longstanding recommendation for hepatitis B shots at birth. The order signals Trump’s alignment with Kennedy’s agenda, despite broad medical criticism and concerns over the panel’s embrace of debunked vaccine theories. It also accelerates a sweeping review of the entire childhood immunization schedule, which Trump argues is overly extensive. Medical groups, including the American Medical Association, condemned the hepatitis B decision as unsupported by evidence and harmful to public trust in proven vaccines.
Attached is a letter NYSDOH sent to Healthcare Providers on Friday regarding ACIP’s vote on the Hepatitis B Vaccine, fyi.
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Rural Health Transformation Program(Politico, 12/8) THE FIGHT FOR FUNDING — States are pledging to enact White House-favored policies for a chance to win bigger shares of a $50 billion rural health fund that Congress and President Donald Trump created in July, POLITICO’s Alice Miranda Ollstein, Ruth Reader and Liz Crampton report. In pitches submitted in November to the Rural Health Transformation Program, state officials described a crisis in rural America — an explosion of chronic illnesses, hours-long drives for basic services, a scourge of addiction — and laid out their plans for turning things around. But in a bid to get more funding, several also vowed to change their own laws, like restricting low-income people from using food benefits to buy junk food or expanding telehealth — promises they may not be able to keep in the coming years. Why it matters: Democrats and health advocates described the Trump administration’s criteria for doling out the money as highly unusual, and some fear it could be wielded to favor political allies.“I’ve been working in government and health policy for 20-plus years, and I can’t recall another scenario where it was quite this direct in terms of, ‘If you work on these policy changes at the state level, we will give you funding,’” said Carrie Cochran-McClain, the chief policy officer for the National Rural Health Association, which represents state and local officials who work on rural health. Background: When the Trump administration begins distributing the money at the end of the year, it will divide half of the $50 billion evenly among all states that apply, regardless of population. It will also dole out a quarter of the funds based on factors like the size of a state’s rural population, how much free health care its providers give to people who can’t afford to pay, and how large its land area is.The rest is up to the discretion of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services based on how well states’ plans align with the Trump administration’s vision for the program.And $3.75 billion of that, or 7.5 percent of the total, hinges on whether states pass a series of policies. States will receive “full credit” for laws they’ve already changed, and “partial credit” for pledges to make changes. If states don’t implement those promised policies by the end of 2027, or 2028 for some of the more complex policies, the Trump administration has threatened to claw back a portion of the money.Key context: Some of the incentivized policies are popular across the political spectrum, while others are popular with conservatives and reviled by many progressives, including food stamp restrictions and deregulating cheaper-but-skimpier short-term insurance plans.Several of the policies are designed to advance the food and fitness goals of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement. Others are divisive within the medical community but not partisan, like allowing nurses, dentists, pharmacists and EMTs to provide services previously restricted to doctors. None of the policies are specific to rural residents, and would impact states’ entire populations.In a statement to POLITICO, a CMS spokesperson stressed that state policy is just one of the programs’ many components, that no state is forced to adopt any policy, and that states will get “significant baseline funding” regardless of what laws they do or don’t adopt. |
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Attention NYS Council Hospitals, D&TCs, FQHCs
(DoH Memo attached to this email)
New York issues amended guidance for health facility closures
The state Department of Health’s new guidelines supersede a 2023 version.
By: Maya Kaufman | 12/05/2025 11:20 AM EST, Politico
Health care facilities that plan to end services — or close their doors for good — now have a new set of rules to follow, POLITICO Pro’s Maya Kaufman reported.
The state Department of Health issued revised guidance last week for temporary and permanent closures, laying out a specific timeline for facilities to give advanced notice of their plans to regulators and engage with the public.
Under the new rules, a facility may not discontinue services or reduce beds before its closure plan is approved. But the department reserves the right to issue prior written approval to “complete discrete actions” during the closure plan process.
“The revised guidance was re-organized by type of closure and listed in a step-by-step manner to emphasize and clarify the necessary steps required for submitting and receiving approval of complete closure plans,” department spokesperson Danielle De Souza said in a statement.
The new rules supersede state guidance from August 2023 that did not distinguish between temporary and permanent closures — a major gripe within the hospital industry.
Kenneth Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, referred to the revised guidelines as an improvement from the 2023 version’s “one-size-fits-all approach.”
“GNYHA has been advocating for and appreciates DOH’s restructuring of its guidance to create different standards for different types of closures,” Raske wrote in a memo Tuesday to hospital CEOs, which was shared with POLITICO.
Gov. Kathy Hochul vetoed a bill last year — known as the LICH Act — that would have imposed stricter requirements on the hospital closure process but directed the Department of Health to develop and propose reforms.
Patient advocacy groups continue pressing the governor to sign the LICH Act, which passed the Legislature again this year.