For anyone who has worked with Tricia Brooks over the last twenty years, it is impossible to imagine her retiring. Tricia has been the heart and soul of much of the Center for Children and Families’ work with state and national partners and a leading national expert on Medicaid eligibility and enrollment, health care quality, and administrative data tracking. Her energy is seemingly boundless, and her dedication to improving access to health care has been a mission spanning much of her adult professional life.
Tricia served as the Chief Executive Officer of New Hampshire Healthy Kids, a legislatively-created, non-profit corporation that administered the state’s CHIP program and served as the Medicaid and CHIP consumer assistance hub from 1994 to 2008. New Hampshire’s CHIP program was a model for the nation when CHIP was passed in 1997.
In 2008, Tricia joined CCF as a Research Professor. In addition to her CCF duties, Tricia served two terms as a member of the Congressionally chartered Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC) from 2019 to 2025. Tricia has also been the lead author of the annual 50-state KFF/CCF survey on Medicaid/CHIP eligibility and enrollment practices, an essential reference for any Medicaid-absorbed professional. This is just one of many contributions Tricia has made to the field over the years. In recognition of her accomplishments, Georgetown University has named her a Professor Emeritus and she will continue to serve as the lead author of the KFF-CCF survey.
Tricia has a vast amount of Medicaid/CHIP knowledge that served as the inspiration for the CCF state data and policy hub launched in 2019. We affectionately refer to this online resource as “Tricia’s brain,” but of course, Tricia’s brain power cannot be captured online – even with the help of AI. She has an uncanny ability to understand interactions between federal and state policy changes and how they will impact people covered by Medicaid and CHIP. For many years, Tricia has served on the CMS Workgroup for the Child and Adult Core Sets, working with CMS and other Medicaid experts to identify which quality measures would best drive improvement in care delivery and health. Inspired by that work, Tricia worked through dense CMS quality chart packs to make the data more accessible and actionable for our state data hub – resulting in the star system with clear visuals to identify which measures required more attention for quality improvement by state. This type of work, and really, way of thinking, is part of Tricia’s secret sauce – she reads and digests incredibly dense and complicated regulations and data, and she turns them into something people can use to make Medicaid and CHIP work better for the people it serves and the state officials tasked with administering it.
Tricia always kept the children and families who rely on Medicaid and CHIP to meet their health care needs at the center of her work. She wrote hundreds of blogs and reports about health policy that stakeholders relied upon to understand important nuances of health policy changes. Even though the content was not directed at consumers, they also found her work online and would reach out to her to ask for advice on how to maintain health coverage for themselves or their children. Tricia always took the time to research individual cases and respond to consumer inquiries.
As eligibility and enrollment changes from the Affordable Care Act were being implemented, Tricia worked in partnership with a wide-ranging group of Medicaid experts and CMS as part of a federal-state “feedback loop.” Tricia took the information she gathered from the KFF-CCF survey and partners across the states straight to the policymakers at CMS to help identify the top priorities for systemic improvements. She also gathered information from CMS to share back with state leaders about key policy developments. In early 2015, Tricia posted a series of seven blogs on the theme “Getting MAGI Right.” Even those of us who are deeply entrenched in Medicaid and CHIP policy will not dispute that there are few topics more technical and eye-glazing than the nuts and bolts of eligibility rules. Yet Tricia somehow found a way to make them accessible to a broad audience looking for accurate and accessible information about eligibility changes from a reputable source, as evidenced by the huge number of views the series receives on CCF’s website.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, states were required to maintain coverage for people enrolled in Medicaid, but when this requirement came to an end, states faced the huge task of processing renewals for millions of people at once. This became known as “the unwinding” and once again, Tricia brought her expertise in policy and administration to bear to help keep eligible children and adults enrolled.
Tricia has an encyclopedic knowledge of which data points CMS and the states publish and what they can tell us about how Medicaid and CHIP systems are operating, coupled with an instinctive ability to synthesize and communicate technical information. Whether by highlighting “red flags” in state readiness to implement changes, monitoring renewal outcomes, or tracking enrollment, she has cheered states on in their successes and sounded early alarms during turbulent times. The resources and data trackers she developed even sparked some friendly competition among states – Medicaid Directors wanted to be on Tricia’s “good list.”
Tricia also inspired us with her “soft skills” such as her ability to keep walking briskly on her treadmill while discussing heady health policy topics. Or her uncanny ability to sum up our annual conference in poetry and recite it on the final day. We couldn’t match Tricia’s poetry, so we wrote her a song and had a group sing-along and tambourine jam session to the tune of “Dancing Queen” by ABBA at our conference last fall. We also had a guest appearance by Jack the Georgetown Bulldog, who fell in love with Tricia (the feeling was mutual).
“Ask Tricia” has been a frequent refrain around CCF whenever confronted with a weedy health policy or data question. Her keen insights developed over many years of service and her mentorship of CCF staff and health policy professionals across the country have helped shape CCF into what it is today. It is hard to imagine doing this work without her, but fortunately we don’t have to. In her new role as Professor Emeritus, Tricia will continue to be the lead author of the 50-state survey with KFF. And more importantly, she has agreed to keep answering our questions.