In the early 1990′s, faced with health care costs that were rising at unmanageable rates and widespread dissatisfaction with the quality of the state’s Medicaid program, the Oklahoma Legislature created the Oklahoma Health Care Authority (OHCA) as  a stand-alone agency whose primary mission would be to convert the state’s fee-for-service Medicaid program into a primarily managed care program. To implement managed care, the state submitted a Section 1115 demonstration waiver for the program, which would come to be known as SoonerCare. Earlier this year, Mathematica Research, a nationally-recognized evaluation company, delivered a comprehensive 1115 waiver evaluation on the SoonerCare program since its inception. You can access an Executive Summary of the findings, a PowerPoint, or the 175+-page full report. Read the rest of this entry »