Short people got no reason — to pump up their height on the taxpayer’s dime.
Gov. Cuomo’s administration is considering eliminating Medicaid funding for hormone-growth treatment provided to kids who have no medical reason to get it.
The move would save the state $10 million a year for a procedure most private insurers won’t even cover.
The bottom line: Taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the medical bill to increase the height of people who are naturally short, officials said.
“Not medically necessary. Idiopathic short stature is not considered to be a disease,’’ said a Medicaid benefit-review panel co-chaired by state Health Commissioner Dr. Nirav Shah.
The recommendation notes that private insurance plans do not pay for height issues “caused by heredity and not caused by a diagnosed medical condition.”
Kids whose growth is stunted by growth-hormone deficiency, a medical condition, would continue to receive hormone injections through Medicaid, the panel said.
In 2010, 2,593 children received growth-hormone therapy through Medicaid at a cost of $40 million.
But 30 percent of those kids did not have a documented medical condition, the panel said.
One study showed it costs $55,634 per child in treatment to grow an inch, and $99,959 for a boost of 1.9 inches over five years.
“While it may be intuitive that short stature is a handicap and therefore definable as a disease, neither history nor clinical research support this notion,” Arian Rosenbloom, of the University of Florida College of Medicine, wrote in the International Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology.
The benefits-review panel also urged the governor to support other cost-saving proposals that would bar Medicaid from paying for steroid injections for lower-back treatment and curb payments for unnecessary Caesarean sections.
Medicaid paid out some $7.7 million for questionable back treatments in 2010.
ALso last year, there were 4,543 C-section deliveries performed without evidence of medical necessity. Medicaid could save at least $5 million by cutting payments for “pre-term” C-sections, officials said.
Meanwhile, the panel also proposed that Medicaid expand coverage of the therapeutic treatment of obesity, increased use of tobacco-cessation programs and lactation counselors for breast-feeding moms.
The obesity-screening program would cost $61.5 million to treat 38,470 patients in the first year. Health officials insist the program would eventually reduce costly chronic conditions like diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and hospitalizations.
Officials estimated that providing breast-feeding counselors to pregnant moms would actually reduce Medicaid costs by curbing infections in newborns.
Many of the proposals are expected to be included in Cuomo’s budget plan to be unveiled next month. New York’s mammoth Medicaid program cost $53 billion this year.