NJ Special Education Loses $30 Million - to Laziness?
While the bureaucracy of claiming these Medicaid funds is certainly likely a maze – failure of our districts to navigate that bureaucracy can only be explained away by laziness!
It would be like if you file claims with your health insurance company and they don’t pay and try to reject and you follow through to make sure you get the rightful reimbursement. It’s a pain but if you don’t ride them you lose thousands$$.
So here we have it – our districts losing budgets across the state – some of them passing resolutions blaming special education children for their shortfalls and for the failures even in the regular ed department.
And here we go -
$30 million in unclaimed reimbursements – with districts fighting us to deny
services instead of doing their job and administering the paperwork for these
reimbursements.
See:
http://www.app.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060522/NEWS03/605220315/1007/rss03
FEDS' FUNDS UNPAID
Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 05/22/06
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
ATLANTIC CITY — New Jersey school districts may be missing out on as much as $30 million per year in unclaimed Medicaid funds, meant to pay for disabled students.
School officials say there are few incentives to improve the situation because the program has a small reimbursement share, restrictions and rules for filing claims, and lengthy delays for receiving money.
"We haven't gotten one dollar yet this year. They're telling us maybe July 1," Barbara Morvay, superintendent of the Atlantic County Special Services School, told The Press of Atlantic City for Sunday newspapers.
"It's a pain to do it and a lot of school districts just don't want to bother anymore," Morvay said.
Garden State schools provide nursing and various types of therapies — speech, physical, occupational and psychological — to disabled students.
The Special Education Medicaid Initiative, or SEMI, is projected to bring in $19 million this year, according to Suzanne Esterman, spokeswoman for the state Department of Human Services, which coordinates the program. But that is less than half of the estimated $50 million the program could bring in each year.
Of the reimbursed funds, districts get 15 percent. But not even that share is guaranteed.
During the 2004-05 school year, the Atlantic County Special Services School was reimbursed about $16,700 of the $50,000 anticipated.
"They just didn't reimburse us to the level we filed," said school business administrator Thomas DeBiaso.
"In the past we sometimes got some money retroactively, so we keep doing it and hope they come through," DeBiaso said.
In 2004, just a quarter of the state's school districts participated in the SEMI program.
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