Gov. Sarah Sanders’ Secretary of the Arkansas Department of Human Services, Janet Mann, laid out her vision for how she’ll guide the sprawling state agency that oversees programs affecting children, families, senior citizens and those with disabilities.
Mann, a veteran of the agency having served as State Medicaid Director and other roles, succeeds Kristi Putnam, Sanders’ first agency director.
In an interview with Talk Business & Politics, Mann said she hopes to continue momentum on the maternal health front and she explained other areas of the agency’s oversight that she is keeping a watchful eye.
“I think first and foremost we need to continue on some of the momentum that we had started with maternal health. We’ve moved into the implementation mode. We had a bill that the governor proposed and the legislature passed and she signed. So now we’ve moved into the implementation of maternal health and now we’re taking those results as they come month-by-month and really seeing what’s happening and driving future decisions,” she said.
“We’re also going to still continue to focus on behavioral health really with an emphasis on children and school age children. But another piece of that that’s very important is children before they go to school,” said Mann. “So what can we do there? We have several pilots going and really want to use those evidence-based outcomes to drive better decisions and better programs.”
Mann discussed the forthcoming changes in federal Medicaid rules that are being developed after passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the omnibus budget bill that alters Medicaid funding for states.
“In addition to work requirements, we’ve been working on it for several years. We have a pending waiver and now we are into implementation and going live, and the team is working really hard given what was passed in the budget bill at Capitol Hill and signed by the president. We already had a pending waiver amendment requesting to do that. So now we will reconcile those two documents and then come forward with work requirements on or before January 1, 2027, which is the required deadline date,” said Mann.
Mann noted that the budget bill calls for 20 hours a week, or 80 hours of a month, of work, training, volunteering, or caretaking for able-bodied Medicaid recipients.
“I think we’re going to still use a lot of what we proposed with reporting of all types and then exceptions. We really want to focus on the ex parte, which is the administrative process of matching work requirements through electronic means, but make it easier for the beneficiary to report and know what they’re doing,” she said.
“We’ll have to work out some details on the volunteering and caretaking piece of that because we will have lots of data matches that we can use for people going to work, people going to school and doing different things. And so we will work through those logistics on how we do reporting,” added Mann.
The OBBB passed by Congress created a fund to help rural hospitals and healthcare providers. Mann said her agency is very focused on optimizing Arkansas benefits from this.
“The state’s going to receive up to about $500 million over five years on the Rural Transformation Healthcare Fund. We are busy with different entities, statewide and providers and others working on how to implement that. That’ll be an application process that we don’t have the guidance on yet, but we’re already building the baseline of metrics and things. So really using that money to look at what we’re going to do in rural Arkansas to help healthcare to hopefully mitigate some of the unknown and some of the known rising costs,” she said.
Mann discussed several other changes from the federal budget bill and what’s happening in the health care marketplace as well as SNAP and the importance of controlling fraud in the program.
You can watch her full interview in the video below.