Allie Gardner

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Allexa Gardner

Allie Gardner Dunakey is the Research Associate at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy’s Center for Children and Families (CCF). She has a Master’s in Public Policy from Georgetown University. Her master’s thesis, entitled “The Effect of the Affordable Care Act on Access to Care for Children in the South,” focused on the intersection of her interests in access to care and health care in rural communities. Allie earned a BS in Economics from the University of Alabama specializing in Public Policy and Law.
Before joining Center for Children and Families, she worked on domestic health policy at a state children’s hospital as well as foreign policy issues while serving in the public sector.

Latest From Allexa

Some States’ Letters to CMS on Medicaid Work Requirements Double Down

Last month, CMS began taking steps to get rid of Medicaid section 1115 work requirement waivers as my colleague Joan Alker has written about. The Biden Administration sent letters to states with approved work requirements that “preliminarily” disapproved the policy on the basis of the COVID-19 pandemic and uncertainty of its aftermath on health and […]

The Tennessee Waiver: Block Grant, Aggregate Cap, or Windfall?

In their wondrous 1957 interpretation of a Gershwin classic, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong sing, “You like potato and I like potahto/You like tomato and I like tomahto.” Their back-and-forth has echoes in the current debate over what to call the TennCare III demonstration, approved on January 8 by the former CMS Administrator, Seema Verma. […]

Georgia’s Medicaid Waiver is Fiscally Foolish and Anti-Family

On October 15th, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma traveled to Atlanta to announce the approval of Georgia’s “Pathways to Coverage” Section 1115 Medicaid demonstration. The approval is the latest in CMS Administrator Verma’s ideological crusade to “reframe” Medicaid and promote her signature initiative — work requirements. The creation of a […]

More Evidence Medicaid Work Requirements Don’t Actually Work

A new study from Ben Sommers and other researchers at Harvard University finds that Medicaid work requirements fail to promote employment but do result in more people losing their health coverage and may promote other negative health outcomes. The study, published in Health Affairs, found that negative economic consequences ensued as well – with medical […]