New Mexico’s Health Care Authority Secretary Kari Armijo presented an update on the state’s access to both physical and behavioral health care at a Legislative Finance Committee meeting in Taos on Wednesday. Despite an increase in the number of behavioral health providers and greater patient utilization, the state is seeing worse outcomes in a few areas.
Armijo said more than 4,000 new providers have moved into New Mexico’s Medicaid network over the last 11 months, with 57% of those in behavioral health.
She said New Mexico is now 16th in the nation for access to behavioral health care.
“So not at the top, which is where we all want to be,” Armijo said, “but it's showing that these interventions are working.”
Armijo said the recent increase in Medicaid reimbursement rates to providers greatly contributed to that increase.
“We raised those (reimbursement) rates for behavioral health to 150% of the Medicare rate in January,” she said. “That is making a difference.”
But according to a recent report the state has slid in national rankings in a few areas, including the prevalence of mental illness — dropping from 36th to 44th — as well as youth experiencing major depressive episodes, and both adult and youth substance use disorders, with the land of enchantment coming in dead last for youth substance use.
“We're struggling with a new set of issues in many ways that weren't present a decade ago,” she said. “I think, in terms of substance use disorder for sure.”
Some senators expressed concern that the state has declined in rankings despite a large increase in spending on behavioral health care recently. Democratic Senator Tara Lujan of Santa Fe said the state has been working hard for results that haven’t seemed to materialize.
“I'm not happy with the rankings we're seeing in New Mexico’s behavioral health,” Lujan said. “This is so very concerning for me when we've invested $2.2 billion over the last few years for new services.”
But when it comes to behavioral health care utilization, the state has improved by almost 350% in the number of appointments per 1,000 residents. Democratic State Senator Linda Trujillo of Santa Fe said the increased utilization might explain the lower rankings. She said the state might simply be treating cases that would have gone uncounted and untreated in the past.
“I just want to make sure that through our numbers we don't insinuate that identifying someone with a mental health crisis or mental health issues is a bad thing,” Trujillo said.
Moreover, LFC Analyst Eric Chenier pointed out that more recent data is just starting to roll in, and the HCA is still determining the finer points of what the new data means.
“We just don't have the data moving through at this point to where we can actually measure (if) we improved from last year to this year in terms of network adequacy,” he said.
The number of New Mexicans getting in to see a doctor for checkups or other physical health needs has decreased by almost 10 percent. Most of the metrics in physical health care have remained roughly the same, but maternal mortality has improved despite the average of low birth weight getting worse.
Support for this coverage comes from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
