ACHA

Part 2 in a series: After thousands of families lost Medicaid, many enrolled their children with complex needs in Florida Healthy Kids, a state insurance plan that wasn’t meant to cover their special care.

Tampa-based U.S. District Judge William Jung issued an injunction in July to halt the rule, which was designed to help prevent discrimination in health care programs that receive federal money.

The numbers provided by the state likely include procedures from April due to an expected lag in reporting.

The contracts will involve tens of billions of dollars in the coming years, with about 3.45 million people receiving health care through the managed-care system as of February

The dispute stems from a program that is designed to help pull down more federal money to go to hospitals.

The December update shows that over 911,000 Floridians were disenrolled from Medicaid since DCF began its redetermination process in April. Of that total, about 420,000 were children.

As enrollment numbers continue to drop, Health and Human Services wrote to Florida and eight other states asking them to work with federal authorities to find solutions and get people insured again.

The Agency for Health Care Administration criticized the judge's decision in a case that focuses on kids in the Medicaid program with conditions that often require round-the-clock care.

The Republican-controlled Senate voted 27-12 along party lines to confirm Ladapo. The Senate also confirmed 15 other agency heads, including Jason Weida as AHCA secretary.

The judge initially rejected a request to have a South Carolina psychiatrist perform the evaluations but gave the state another chance to show how findings from exams would affect “the controlling substantive issue of whether treatments at issue are experimental.”