2011
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Florida’s Progress on Children’s Health Would Unravel if Plan is Approved
Just last week we released a report commending Florida for making significant progress in reducing the number of uninsured children between 2008 and 2010. Today, we are releasing a report that shows Florida will unravel much of that progress if allowed to go forward with proposed changes to its Medicaid program that include the imposition…
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“Medicaid.Gov:” A New Resource for Medicaid Stakeholders
Medicaid stakeholders have a new resource to mine in “Medicaid.Gov.” CMS opened the mine on Monday for prospecting and you’re bound to find, through the site’s updated search functionality, some of those elusive nuggets of information previously not available or buried so deep within the old CMS website that no amount of blasting could unearth.…
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Kansas Lags in Getting More Kids Insured
The Wichita Eagle December 6, 2011 Kansas is tied for last place in the nation in terms of getting more children covered by health insurance and state officials are at a loss to explain why. While most states got more of their children insured from 2008-10, the ranks of uninsured kids in Kansas swelled by…
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Affordable Care Act Has the Potential to Cut Uninsured Rate for Children by Another 40% in 2014
An estimated 3.2 million children could gain health care coverage through the Affordable Care Act, according to a joint report by the Urban Institute and Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families appearing today in the journal “Health Affairs”. Funded through The Atlantic Philanthropies’ KidsWell initiative, the new analysis provides the first in depth estimates…
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Florida Poverty Rates Higher than National Average, More Children Insured by State
Sunshine Slate December 5, 2011 [Washington, DC] The recession of the last couple years put more Florida residents into poverty and resulted in a decrease of median family income in much of the state, the U.S. Census Department reported last Tuesday. Data on poverty and income show school-aged children took the brunt of the economic…
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Public Programs Help Cover Florida
News-Press December 5, 2011 Poverty affects almost one of four children in Florida. That gloomy statistic comes with a silver lining: Because they are signing up for taxpayer-supported health insurance for the poor, the number of uninsured children has dropped sharply since that time, a new study finds. Read the Full Article
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Improving Coverage for Children Under Health Reform Will Require Maintaining Current Eligibility Standards For Medicaid and CHIP
When the Affordable Care Act of 2010 is fully implemented, it will extend health insurance coverage to many adult Americans who currently lack it. It is not known, however, how the health reform legislation will affect children and parents who would otherwise be uninsured. Based on this analysis, health reform has the potential to cut…
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ACA Should Bring Insured Rate for Children Up to 95%
Ever since the Affordable Care Act passed, people have been calling us to ask “What does the law mean for kids and their families?” To my great dismay, we were completely unable to answer this question even though we are, after all, the “Center for Children and Families.” The only thing we could accurately say…
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UPDATE: Arizona – A KidsCare Band-Aid
By Martha Heberlein We’ve written before about Arizona’s response to the recession–substantial budget cuts and the only enrollment freeze in the nation in its CHIP program, KidsCare. Instituted almost two years ago, there are now 129,000 kids on the waiting list for access to affordable health coverage. A new (but somewhat familiar) proposal has emerged to…
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States Still Recuperating, Outlook is Positive
By Tara Mancini The National Association of State Budget Officers just released their Fall 2011 Fiscal Survey of States. We have become accustomed to reading about Medicaid as one of the big-ticket items in state spending. While some detractors have reasoned that increased spending is emblematic of a broken program, NASBO gets it correct by…
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Red Tape Fever
The Salt Lake Tribune December 1, 2011 The police department doesn’t make you prove that your taxes are paid before they respond to your alarm. The fire department won’t expect you to enter your PIN code after you call 911. So why should Utah’s Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program throw unnecessarily high barriers in…
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More Options for Eligibility Determination Potentially Crack the Seamless System
This week, CMS released a Q & A on State-Exchange Implementation with new information on several topics, which are described below. Of concern and worth highlighting is the disappointing departure from the proposed rules by now allowing states that choose not to implement a state-based exchange to retain control over Medicaid and CHIP eligibility. The Notice…
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Despite Economic Challenges, Progress Continues: Children’s Health Insurance Coverage in the United States from 2008-2010
In this paper, health insurance data from the Census Bureau’s annual “American Community Survey” was analyzed in order to get a more accurate depiction of children’s coverage. Even though the number of children living in poverty has increased almost 19 percent over a three-year period, the number of children without health insurance declined 14 percent–…
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Medicaid & CHIP Bring Uninsured Rate for Children Down 14%
Even as unemployment and child poverty has grown, the uninsured rate for children has decreased by 14% nationwide, according to the report we just released today at back-to-back Capitol Hill briefings. It was great to share this good news at House and Senate briefings with overflowing crowds. The briefings were sponsored by the “Children’s Health…
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50 State Analysis Shows Progress in Most States; Despite Gains, Hispanic and Native American children remain disproportionately uninsured
Washington, D.C. – The vast majority of states managed to reduce the number of children going without health insurance during these tough economic times, according to a new report by Georgetown University Health Policy Institute’s Center for Children and Families. The number of children in poverty has increased significantly, yet the number of uninsured children…
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A Compass for America’s Health Care Navigators
By Suzie Shupe, California Coverage & Health Initiatives The Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) health insurance exchange marketplaces offer the promise of connecting millions of uninsured Americans with the health coverage and care they need. And by strengthening Medicaid, millions more will be able to get care. It is an historic opportunity, but also an unprecedented…
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Health Insurance Premium Increases Outpace Wages
Employer-based health insurance costs have increased three times faster than wages since the beginning of the decade. About 62% of those under age 65 live in a state where average health insurance premiums exceed 20% of the median income. In 2010, the average total premium for a family of four was $13,871, an increase of…
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Fuzzy Math: Treasury Department says kids don’t count when determining whether family insurance is affordable?
By Kristen Golden Testa, The Children’s Partnership Since when is 14,000 no different than 5,000? When the U.S. Treasury Department estimates the affordability of a family’s health insurance. If it goes uncorrected, their fuzzy math may deny affordable health coverage to 270,000 Californians–122,000 of whom are children. While premiums continue to rise across the board,…
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Public Health Insurance as Poverty Reducer?
By Martha Heberlein I wanted to share an interesting tidbit that I couldn’t squeeze into my earlier blog on the supplemental poverty measure (SPM). As I mentioned, one of the new parameters included in the SPM is out-of-pocket spending on medical expenses. Well, if you look at those in poverty under the two definitions, it’s…
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New Measure Looks at Broader Definition of Poverty
By Martha Heberlein Let’s travel back in time to 1963 when the poverty threshold was originally developed by a woman at the Social Security Administration named Mollie Orshansky. To come up with the threshold, Mollie took the cost of an economy food plan and multiplied by three, as average spending on food was shown to account…