Former top state official Dr. Bruce Goldberg has a new job that brings him back to his roots in an underserved community he served early in his career -- Native Americans.
Goldberg will be assisting Oregon’s tribes to help them set up more effective managed and coordinated care, now that the federal government has loosened its rules for funding healthcare for low-income American Indians.
The new rules allow for full federal funding for Medicaid-eligible Indians for services rendered outside the Indian Health Service clinics, so long as the payments pass through the tribes, which can then delegate off-site, non-Indian providers to serve their tribal members.
The old rules didn’t allow for full funding of off-site care, making access to speciality care for Native Americans particularly difficult.
“There’s been real problems getting surgery services to the tribes,” said current Oregon Health Authority Director Lynne Saxton, when announcing Goldberg’s new role at the Health Policy Board yesterday. .
About 1.4 percent of Oregonians are indigenous, American Indians -- the tenth-highest percentage in the United States. Oregon has nine federally recognized tribes.
Goldberg served as the director of the Department of Human Services and then the Oregon Health Authority for a total of eight years, playing a key role in the launch of the coordinated care model for Oregon’s Medicaid system, but he was ultimately forced to resign for the poor oversight of the state’s failed health insurance exchange, Cover Oregon, after the state squandered more than $300 million in federal funds on a website that never worked.
Despite Goldberg’s inglorious exit from atop the state bureaucracy, the Oregon Health Authority has created a “Dr. Bruce Goldberg Health Equity Champion” award to honor his role in the Medicaid system transformation.
Goldberg served as a community health director for the Indian Health Service in Zuni, N.M., and more recently has come on board at Oregon Health & Science University as a senior fellow and senior associate director of the Oregon Rural Practice Based Research Network at the Center for Health Systems Effectiveness.
Jim Roberts, a former policy analyst for the Northwest Indian Health Board, welcomed the news of Goldberg’s new role with the tribes, arguing that the former state official’s experience at one of the most reform-minded Medicaid programs and his early work with the Indian Health Service made Goldberg uniquely qualified to improve the care of native Americans.
“Bruce is a former IHS physician, and I think he has the knowledge and opportunity with his understanding of Indian Health and the Medicaid system,” Roberts told The Lund Report. Roberts now works as a senior executive for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium in Anchorage.
