Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond
OKLAHOMA CITY (Oct. 23, 2025) — Attorney General Gentner Drummond is demanding answers from the Oklahoma Health Care Authority (OHCA) about failures within the managed Medicaid care system a year and a half after Gov. Stitt hailed the program as the savior for Oklahoma healthcare.
In a letter sent yesterday to OHCA Director Clay Bullard, Drummond said the backbone of children’s health care in Oklahoma – the small, community-based providers who care for Oklahoma kids – is being squeezed financially so that out-of-state corporations can profit.
Drummond said Oklahoma-based healthcare providers have detailed several alarming trends that are straining their capacity to provide critical healthcare services to Medicaid-enrolled pediatric patients, including significant reductions in reimbursement for direct pediatric care, payment withholdings and bureaucratic delays. Oklahoma’s Medicaid program is called SoonerCare and almost half of enrollees are children.
“Without immediate correction, these failures will destroy Oklahoma’s pediatric network, leaving SoonerCare children across Oklahoma’s 77 counties without access to care,” Drummond wrote.
Out-of-state, corporate managed care organizations (MCOs) have pointed to set-up delays to explain their payment withholdings, an explanation Drummond calls wholly inadequate after the organizations benefitted from a 15-month transition period, which ended in July along with payments.
“Gov. Stitt’s managed care concept is an abject, systemic failure that more closely resembles the disastrous rollout of Obamacare than it does a healthcare panacea,” Drummond said.
Drummond asked OHCA to provide its contracts with the following MCOs:
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Aetna Medicaid Administrators LLC (Aetna Better Health of Oklahoma),
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Humana Inc. (Humana Health Horizons of Oklahoma), and
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Centene Corp. (Oklahoma Complete Health).
Drummond also instructed the Authority to review provider reimbursement failures and to identify measures to remedy the managed care deficiencies.
“If the Authority fails to address the decrease in reimbursement and the failure of MCOs to timely reimburse providers, providers will shut their doors to Medicaid patients and, perhaps, all patients,” Drummond emphasized. “This will decrease Oklahomans’ access to quality health care and devastate rural health. Taxpaying, hardworking Oklahomans are at risk of seeing their hard-earned money disappear into the fog of waste, fraud and abuse—a common occurrence during the Stitt Administration—all for nothing.”
Read the letter.
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