COA to cut staff after loss of Medicare contract

Three employees will be laid off from the Council on Aging this January, after the non-profit this summer lost its long-time transportation contract under Medicaid to another company.

Residents in Whitman, Garfield and Asotin counties who qualified for this specific Medicaid program will now work with a different transportation provider, Special Mobility Services, to whom the Council on Aging and Human Services lost their bid in October.

ÒThey beat us out in the bid,Ó said Karl Johanson, executive director of the Council on Aging.

The Council on Aging will also lose $125,000 annually in administrative fees from Medicaid because of the loss of the bid.

The contract with state Medicaid specifically reimbursed the Council on Aging to search out rides for clients who were low-income and needed travel to a Medicaid-funded medical visit.

The transportation department of the Council on Aging is COAST, Council on Aging Specialized Transportation.

For 25 years, COAST has found medical rides for those who qualify for the program. The rides had to come from the least expensive, most reasonable source of transportation, said Johanson.

Roughly 20 percent of those rides ended up being contracted out to COAST, Johanson said. For the rest of the rides, COAST connected a client with a private party or another means of transportation.

The new company, SMS, offers the same program in nine other counties. They will now search out rides for the three counties previously served by COAST.

Johanson said SMS, in search of local means of transportation for their counties, may actually end up choosing COAST for some of that transportation.

He does not yet know if they will achieve the same numbers from SMS as they achieved serving 20 percent of their clients themselves.

"We don't know how much of that we'll still be chosen to do. We don't control that decision anymore," Johanson said.

To the typical, low-income rider who qualified for transportation if the destination was a medical trip covered by Medicaid, Johanson said all those riders will now work out a ride with SMS. SMS will then turn around and source out that ride to any number of local transportation sources, which could include COAST.

ÒSome people we've been transporting for as much as 25 years and it'll be very different for them,Ó he added.