ABSTRACT
Commissioner Howard Newman, who arrived in Washington in February 1970, was to go some way toward changing that image. Certainly, in the wake of the Senate Finance Report and the McNerney Report, there was a dramatic increase in staff and effectiveness. In part, however, the real change was the realization, dramatized in Congressional hearings, that if federal costs were to be contained, there had to be stronger federal direction. In any event, by the fall of 1971, the first phase of MSA's reorganization under the "New Broom" was about to be succeeded by a second. Perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the most important development, was with respect to the selective cut-off of funds. The development and implementation of regulations for early and periodic screening, diagnosis, and treatment (EPSDT) of needy children under the age of 21, as required by the 1967 Social Security Amendments, brought MSA squarely into the arena of the direct provision of health care.
