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Medicaid and CHIP Are Powerful Tools for Supporting Child Social and Emotional Development
The Center for the Study of Social Policy, with our partners at Manatt Health, are excited to release a new resource, Fostering Social and Emotional Health through Pediatric Primary Care: A Blueprint for Leveraging Medicaid and CHIP to Finance Change, which is designed as a practical guide for advancing action in the pediatric primary care setting.…
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New Study Finds Arkansas Medicaid Work Requirement Isn’t Working
As readers of SayAhhh! know, we have been closely following the developments in Arkansas – which was the first state to implement a Medicaid work requirement in the second half of 2018 before a federal judge stepped in and put a hold on the state’s Section 1115 waiver. However, prior to the court’s intervention, more…
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New Data Find Troubling Decline in Child Enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP Continues in Many States
Several months ago, we began to highlight concerns over the declining enrollment of children in Medicaid and CHIP. Just last month we published a brief on the unusual decline, noting that child enrollment had dropped by nearly 1 million children in 38 states in 2018. Although overall national enrollment was up by close to 20k…
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Counting All Children in the 2020 Census Would Benefit Poor Children: State and Local Advocates Can Help
Being counted in the Decennial Census helps young children thrive. When they are counted, their communities get their fair share of over 800 billion dollars a year in federal funding that is allocated by formula using data derived from the federal Census. Those programs include many that remediate the harmful effects of poverty on young…
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State Policymakers Can Give Children the Best Start in Life by Maximizing and Aligning Investments
So much about a child’s health and growth is set in the years before their third birthday, when their brain is developing at a faster pace than at any time in life. As research continues to confirm, the early years of a child’s life set the stage for a lifetime of good health and well-being.…
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How Does Health Coverage for Adults Impact Children’s Healthy Development?
As federal and state policymakers debate the merits of affordable health care coverage for adults, it’s important to review the impact that adult coverage has on children’s healthy development. So naturally we were delighted when the Society for Research in Child Development asked us to work with them on a summary of the latest research.…
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In Utah, Another Attempt to Limit Access to Health Care Coverage
Utah revealed the next chapter in its drawn-out Medicaid expansion debate on May 31. Unsurprisingly, it’s yet another attempt to limit access to affordable health care coverage. Rather than heeding the will of the voters and implementing Prop 3 – which would have given 150,000 low-income Utahans access to Medicaid coverage – the state has…
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Medicaid Block Grants: Questions State Leaders Should Ask
CMS Administrator Seema Verma, the top federal Medicaid official, has been encouraging states to be the first on the block to block grant their Medicaid programs. Some states are beginning to respond. Late last month Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee signed legislation directing him to submit a proposal for a Medicaid block grant to the federal…
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What is CMS Administrator Verma’s Vision for “Reframing” Medicaid?
Last week, CQ Roll Call posted an interview with Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Seema Verma on the “Future of Medicaid Flexibility.” In it, she is quoted as follows: “As I look at the Medicaid program, we really want to reframe how we’ve been operating for the last 50 years. It’s really…
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CCF Submits Comments on Administration’s Damaging Proposal to Change How Poverty is Measured
We submitted public comments to the Trump Administration’s proposal to change how the Census Bureau’s Official Poverty Measure (OPM) is adjusted annually for inflation. As we have previously written, while this sounds like a highly technical change, it would likely result in fewer children eligible for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) relative…
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Another Troubling Sign: Child Participation Rates in Medicaid and CHIP Dropped in 2017
Since the 2017 ACS data was released in September 2018, we have been concerned about the first increase in the number of uninsured children in a decade as highlighted in our annual uninsured children’s report. We became even more concerned as we watched the number of children enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP drop in 2018,…
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Why Are So Many Children Losing Medicaid/CHIP Coverage?
Along with the American Academy of Pediatrics, First Focus and the Children’s Defense Fund, Georgetown University CCF held a press tele-conference and released a report examining an alarming trend in children’s health coverage. The report shows that more than 800,000 fewer children had Medicaid/CHIP coverage at the end of 2018 compared to 2017. This trend…
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Fewer Florida Children Enrolled In Medicaid, CHIP In 2018, Report Says
WUSF Public Media By: Julio Ochoa The number of children covered by Medicaid declined in Florida and other states for the first time in more than a decade. With the unemployment rate at historic lows, that could mean that more children are being covered by their parents’ employers. But some experts say something else is…
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Red Tape And Immigration Fears Have Led To A Drop In Health Coverage For Texas Children
KUT 90.5 Austin Public Radio By: Ashley Lopez About 146,000 fewer children in Texas were enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program between the end of 2017 and the end of 2018, according to a study released Thursday by the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families. Nationwide more than 828,000 fewer children…
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Kids are Losing Health Insurance and GOP Policies Look Like a Big Reason Why
Huff Post By: Jonathan Cohn The number of children getting health coverage through two large government programs fell by more than 800,000 last year, according to a new report from Georgetown University. The enrollment decline could be an indicator that the number of kids without any kind of health insurance went up in 2018, one…
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Maternal Depression Costs Society Billions Each Year, New Model Finds
The most common pregnancy complication is also among the costliest, for moms, babies and society at large. A new cost model created by researchers at Mathematica finds that untreated mood and anxiety disorders among pregnant women and new moms cost about $14.2 billion for births in 2017, when following the mom and child pair for…
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Texas Women Needed Help From the Legislature. They Didn’t Get It.
Dallas Observer By: Stephen Young More than 25% of Texas women between ages 18 and 44 don’t have health insurance coverage. That’s one of the biggest takeaways from a new study into the effects of Medicaid expansion on maternal health from the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute. Texas’ uninsured rate for women of child-bearing age…
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Study Says Idaho is Among States with Highest Number of Uninsured Women
670 KBOI News By: Jay Howell Georgetown University says Idaho’s women of childbearing age are some of the most uninsured in the country. Joan Alker with the Georgetown Center for Children and Families says 16% of Idaho’s women between 18 and 44 fall into the so-called Medicaid Gap, and won’t really be helped when expansion…
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Medicaid Expansion Tied to Drops in Maternal, Infant Mortality Rates
Tulsa Public Radio By: Matt Trotter Oklahoma’s maternal and infant mortality rates are 34th and 43rd in the U.S. Researchers report Medicaid expansion could make a difference. Reviews found Medicaid expansion states saw infant mortality rates fall 50 percent more than states that did not expand Medicaid and saw maternal mortality rate declines of 1.6…
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National Academies Report Charts Pathway to Better Health Coverage for Adolescents
Sustaining investments in the health of children as they enter their second decade of life is sound public policy, according to a new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). Not only is adolescence — the developmental period roughly from the age of 10 to 24 — a time of immense…
