New federal poverty guidelines for Alaska are effective March 1, 2009. These increase the income standards used to determine eligibility for the following Medicaid categories:
• Denali KidCare for children and pregnant women;
• Qualified Medicare Beneficiaries (QMB);
• Special Low-Income Medicare Beneficiaries (SLMB and SLMB Plus);
• Transitional Medicaid;
Attached are two posters to display in your office lobbies.
2-1-1 flyers will soon be available in all DPA offices. 2-1-1 is an easy to remember telephone number that connects callers to free information about critical health and human services available in their community. Until 2-1-1, there was no single, comprehensive statewide provider of information and referral for Alaskans.
From: Mary Riggen-Ver, Chief, Program Integrity and Analysis
Just a couple more months of the Preliminary Swim remain before we see some indication of how our salmon are starting out on their Successful Navigation to Awesome Performance. While some of you may be excited about this, others may be asking what on earth salmon have to do with program accuracy. The answer to that is nothing really. However, we are known world-wide for our wild Alaska salmon, and our state fish is the king salmon. So what better way to ride out the waves to awesome performance than with our winning Alaskan salmon?
Successfully Navigating to Awesome Performance with the SNAP Salmon Challenge!
2009 Accuracy Improvement Campaign
From: Mary Riggen-Ver, Chief, Program Integrity and Analysis
Our little SNAP salmon are now testing out the water in the “Preliminary Swim”. The Preliminary Swim reflects the first 9 months of FFY 2008 Food Stamp payment accuracy (October 2007 through June 2008). The plan to use a 4-month rolling average wasn’t feasible as some really large unrepresentative client caused errors occurred during those 4 months that skewed the data and inaccurately reflected our work. Our little salmon have been struggling a bit lately as they try to figure out how to navigate. Our FFY 2008 Food Stamp payment accuracy rate now stands at 92.8%, well below our 96% payment accuracy rate for FFY 2007.