Some of you may remember that the Affordable Care Act included a provision that required the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to review and certify the comparability of pediatric coverage of qualified health plans to the benefits and cost-sharing of CHIP plans in each state. In fact this analysis was supposed to be completed by no later than April 1, 2015. Today, more than seven months later, we are still waiting for the Administration to release the study.

While as readers of SayAhh! know, CHIP was extended for another two years, Congress will have to make another decision about its fate before September 30, 2017. The question of whether to put kids who are currently in CHIP into the marketplace with federal subsidies is a critical one – indeed, likely the defining question about CHIP’s future. The Congressionally chartered Medicaid and CHIP Payment Access Commission (MACPAC) has suggested this is one way to go when and if the marketplace coverage improves and meets CHIP standards.

So the question of how these two coverage sources compare is a critical one. We and others have done work to look at this, but it’s a tough undertaking and few have the resources that HHS can bring to bear on this question. Just last week MACPAC released its own analysis comparing CHIP and QHP coverage. This is useful and important work to advance the debate but it doesn’t substitute for the HHS study.

At the end of the day HHS has a statutory obligation to release their own analyses, which will be critically important to inform the debate about how children’s health care needs can best be met going forward. It’s already well overdue, so in my opinion, it should be released sooner rather than later.