metrowestdailynews.com
By State House News Service
Posted Jan 09, 2012 @ 02:02 PM

Though it was not unexpected, state officials don’t yet have a complete plan to deal with a high court ruling that roughly 30,000 legal immigrants were unfairly excluded from a state health care program.

“Over the time of this deliberation we’ve understood that there might be a need to adjust the way that things go,” Health and Human Services Secretary JudyAnn Bigby said Friday.

Bigby's remarks came a day after the decision as she headed into a Cabinet meeting in Gov. Deval Patrick’s office, followed by budget meetings where final decisions were being made on a fiscal 2013 spending plan.

“We’ve been looking at what the cost implementation has been,” she said.

The Supreme Judicial Court ruled on Thursday that a lower-cost Commonwealth Care alternative, called the bridge program, violates the state constitution. That program is run by CeltiCare, an offshoot of Centene, which runs other Connector programs as well.

Connector spokesman Dick Powers said he didn’t anticipate any contractual problems with CeltiCare caused by the ruling. When asked about the contract, Bigby said, “We haven’t resolved that yet.”

Administration officials estimate $150 million more will need to be dedicated to pay for the health care needs of immigrants affected by the decision.

Following the Cabinet meeting, Bigby told the News Service that the administration had not been caught completely off guard by the SJC ruling.

“We have had it on our radar screen. We knew given the previous court rulings this was something we should be looking at,” Bigby said.

Though the secretary said she was not sure where the state would find the additional $140 million to $150 million necessary to provide additional coverage until federal money becomes available in 2014 through the Affordable Care Act, she said many immigrants who did not qualify for the bridge program because of a cap on spending would be shifted out of the uncompensated care pool.

Asked whether the court ruling served as a victory of sorts for the Patrick administration after it had initially opposed cutting so-called special status immigrant out of the traditional Commonwealth Care program, Bigby said the decision aligned well with the intent of the 2006 reform law.

“I think that when Chapter 58 was passed in 2006 it envisioned a mechanism to ensure all the people who are legally residents of Massachusetts, including legal immigrants, and we tried very hard to maintain that commitment to universal coverage and we look forward to the opportunity to carry out that vision,” Bigby said.

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