Part
01
of three
Part
01
Medicaid MCO RFPs by State, Part 1
We provided the date when Florida, California, Texas, Ohio, and Indiana will be issuing new requests for proposals (RFP) for Medicaid managed care organizations (MCO). Also, we have provided an estimate of how often they issue them. These can be accessed from rows 3-7 of the attached spreadsheet.
KEY FINDINGS
- On July 14, 2017, Florida issued its last RFP for MCOs. Hence, the projected date when it will issue new RFPs for MCOs is on the 14th of June 2022. The frequency is five years.
- California has updated its new RFP schedules for MCOs to hold in January 2020.
- Between September 15, 2017, and December 4, 2017, Texas issued, canceled and re-issued RFPs for MCOs for various reasons. Hence, the projected date when it will issue new RFPs for MCOs is between September 15, 2019, and On December 4, 2019; as Texas offers a contract duration of two years to MCOs.
- On October 5, 2015, Indiana released the last RFPs for MCOs. Therefore, because it offers a base contract duration of four years, the projected date for the next release would be on October 5, 2019. The estimated frequency is four years.
RESEARCH STRATEGY
To address this request, for each state, we sought for any announcements from their respective healthcare administration agencies and state medicare agencies on the when they will take new RFPs. This strategy yielded the next RFP schedule for California but did not provide the frequency. Also, there were no RFP schedules for the rest of the states — Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Indiana. Furthermore, we searched through industry reports and some local media outlets for any news on their RFP schedules for MCOs but found no additional information.
Alternatively, we sought to provide an estimate of the requested information based on the most recent RFP that was issued out and the contract duration. By simply adding the contract duration to the date the most recent RFP was issued, we projected a very likely date for the next time RFPs will be issued. While we could prove that Florida issues a statewide RFPs for MCOs once, we could not prove the same for the rest of the requested states. Hence, we went ahead to apply this strategy based on the assumption that the states (Texas, Ohio, and Indiana) do not issue new, additional RFPs for MCOs within the projected period or duration.
For Florida, we provided the projected date when the next RFP for MCOs would be issued as a range of months. This because there were several cancellations and withdrawals of their RFPs for reasons, such as making modifications to the RFPs to include a target population and others. Thus, we picked the first date and the last date that they were issued, added the contract duration to obtain a projected range.
However, the above strategy could not be applied for California and Ohio. For California, we could not find the contract duration that it offers to MCOs. While we identified some articles that published some MCOs that are in contract with the state, no information on the contract duration was provided. We also found the boilerplate contract templates it uses for MCOs but no information on the duration was included in these templates. For Ohio, the state recently issued its first-ever RFPs for MCOs because in the past, "Ohio contracted private health insurance corporations to assist it in managing Medicaid benefits for Ohioans." Therefore, we provided the date it issued the first RFP for MCOs, as it appears that the window is still open.