After nearly two years of work, the funding allocation
percentages for each county’s 2011 Realignment Behavioral Health
Subaccount Base have been set. CSAC worked with the Department of
Finance, Health and Human Services Agency, Department of Health
Care Services, and the County Behavioral Health Directors
Association to set this permanent base for 2011 Realignment
Behavioral Health services.
The new base amount for each county is derived from a series of
new factors, including Medi-Cal enrollment (based on a monthly
average) and historical Managed Care allocations. This last
factor proved to be a late-breaking problem, as all parties had
originally agreed to use actual Managed Care claims from 2013-14.
However, using claims data that originated from the year of the
implementation of the Affordable Care Act proved to be an
unreliable measure of a county’s actual costs and would have
resulted in significant losses for many counties. CSAC and CBHDA
worked to communicate our concerns with these swings, and we are
grateful to the Department of Finance for their decision to “stop
the presses” last week on a base with wide swings based on
managed care claims and to instead use each county’s historical
Managed Care allocation.
Despite the managed care factor fix, five counties would have
still experienced a more than 15 percent decline in their
allocation in the current year. The solution was to redistribute
a small portion of the funding that is available after each
county receives the full share of funding based on the
methodology’s factors. This is a one-time adjustment for those
counties to mitigate loss of more than 15 percent in the current
year. This augmentation will become part of each county’s base
moving forward.
The new base also incorporates the “rolling base” concept,
whereby each county’s 2016-17 base amount serves as the starting
point and any growth revenue will be added to each county’s total
allocations received for that fiscal year. We are pleased that
the new base is built upon allocations previously received by
each county under the “temporary base” and that the base will
incorporate base revenues plus growth revenues moving forward.
The new 2011 Realignment Behavioral Health base allocation
percentages for each county are available on the
CSAC Website.
