Where the action really is: Medicaid and the disabled.

Overview

Discussions of Medicaid tend to focus on low-income children and their mothers and the institutionalized elderly as the principal beneficiaries, but Medicaid spends more on the nonelderly disabled than on any other group. In the past two decades Medicaid has helped finance the deinstitutionalization of the mentally retarded and a growing proportion of the mentally ill, but implementation of the Olmstead decision has deflected advocates' attention from the more important issue of how managed care plans treat disabled Medicaid beneficiaries.