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Low-Income Families with Children Will Be Harmed by South Carolina’s Proposed Medicaid Work Reporting Requirement
[Editor’s Note: On March 4, 2019 South Carolina posted a revised application for state public comment.] Introduction South Carolina officials are proposing that very low-income parents and caregivers who qualify for Medicaid fulfill new reporting requirements to show they are working at least 80 hours a month or participating in job- training activities — or…
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Call for Nominations for Child and Adult Core Set Annual Review Workgroup
Each year CMS is required to review both the Child and Adult Core Sets of Health Quality Measures in Medicaid and CHIP. To inform the effort, CMS and its partners convene a multi-stakeholder Medicaid workgroup to provide guidance on the core sets. Mathematica Research is coordinating the recruitment of individuals to participate in the 2019…
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California’s Mandate to Treat Children on Medi-Cal Is Now a Little Clearer
The Medicaid Act, the federal law governing California’s Medi-Cal Program, has long contained specific benefit requirements for covering children and youth under the age of 21 through the Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnostic and Treatment – or “EPSDT” – services mandate. Despite its unmemorable name, this federal mandate critically identifies that children and adolescents are…
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More Arkansans Lose Medicaid Health Coverage Just Before the Holidays
Earlier this week, Arkansas released the latest round of data showing that their misguided policy requiring adults to prove they are working in order to retain Medicaid coverage is continuing to fail. In December, 4,655 people lost health insurance, bringing the total coverage losses to nearly 17,000 so far, though thousands more will lose coverage…
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CMS Announces New Connecting Kids to Coverage Outreach and Enrollment Grants
CMS announced the availability of $48 million in “Connecting Kids to Coverage” outreach and enrollment grants and not a moment too soon. As we recently reported, our nation’s progress on children’s health coverage actually reversed course last year registering the first statistically significant increase in the child uninsured rate in a decade. As a majority…
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Texas Court Decision on the Affordable Care Act: Why Medicaid Expansion Naysayers and Affordable Coverage Opponents Should Be Worried
The Texas federal district court decision striking down the entire Affordable Care Act (ACA) in response to a lawsuit brought by a group of Republican-led states is a radical decision that both conservative and progressive legal experts see as extreme, highly flawed, and unlikely to prevail on appeal. Coming after an election in which Medicaid,…
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Troubling Trend Emerges for Young Children’s Health Coverage, Threatens Healthy Lifelong Development
Last year saw the nation’s first increase in the number of uninsured children in nearly a decade, and young children were not immune to this troubling trend. Just as the rate of uninsured children increased on a statistically significant basis for all children under age 19 between 2016 and 2017, so it increased significantly for…
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Orrin Hatch’s Long And Complicated Legacy Of American Health Care
KUER 90.1 By: Erik Neumann Orrin Hatch authored or co-sponsored over 700 bills — more than any other living lawmaker — making him one of the health care industry’s biggest champions. As prolific as he may have been, Hatch can’t claim sole credit for his influence over the industry as his most significant legislation came by working with…
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More State Medicaid Programs Covering Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Services
Good news: More state Medicaid programs covered infant and early childhood mental health screenings, diagnoses and treatments in 2018 than in 2017. The results from the 2018 update of the National Center for Children in Poverty’s 50-state survey, “How States Use Medicaid to Cover Key Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Services,” illustrate the growing…
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Coverage for Children Under 6 Reversed Course Between 2016 and 2017
For the first time in nearly a decade, the rate of young children without health insurance significantly increased between 2016 and 2017, reversing years of steady progress in reducing the nation’s uninsured rate for children, particularly in the early years. Mirroring national trends for children age 18 and under, state Medicaid coverage rates for children…
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How One Company Is Making Millions Off Trump’s War on the Poor
Mother Jones By: Tracie McMillan … The more likely outcome of a complicated eligibility system, regardless of who runs it, is that people leave the program, losing insurance and suffering the health effects that will cause. In June, Arkansas became the first state to implement work requirements for its Medicaid clients, spending about $7.6 million…
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Number Of Kids With Health Insurance Declines For First Time In A Decade
KJZZ 91.5 By: Mark Brodie In advance of the deadline to enroll in a health care plan on the Affordable Care Act marketplace Saturday, The Show has been talking about the issue of health care this week. More American children did not have health insurance last year than the year before — specifically, an estimated…
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Five States Saw Uninsured Rates Rise for Kids Under 6 – Critical Early Development Years at Risk
We have been digging deeper into the American Community Survey that we use for our annual uninsured report, which showed an increase overall for the first time since this data source began in 2008. Younger kids tend to have a higher rate of coverage than older kids, which makes sense as infants and toddlers are…
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The Number Of Kids Without Health Insurance Is Going Up
Boise State Public Radio By: James Dawson The number of uninsured children across the country has increased for the first time in more than a decade. Despite a strong economy and low unemployment, close to 4 million children in the U.S. do not have health insurance. In Utah that number by grew by 12,000 last…
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‘Kids are falling off’: Why fewer children have health insurance now
NBC News By: Elizabeth Chuck Raquel Cruz has a lot of stress in her life. A single mother of three daughters, she is the manager of a small health clinic and is going to school full-time for an education degree. But her biggest stressor is worrying about health insurance. … Last year, the number of U.S.…
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Arkansas moves to simplify new Medicaid work requirement program
WREG News Channel 3 Arkansas is making some changes to its new Medicaid work requirement program as thousands of residents lose coverage. Medicaid recipients will be able to report the hours they work each month by telephone starting December 19, the Arkansas Department of Human Services announced Wednesday. … Consumer advocates, however, say that the…
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Hundreds of Thousands Weigh in on Proposed Public Charge Rule
This week, we joined over 215,000 individuals and organizations in commenting on the proposed rule to radically change the meaning of public charge. As a reminder, public charge is a term used in U.S. immigration law to refer to a person who is likely to become dependent on the government for financial and material support.…
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CMS Unveils Latest National Health Expenditures Estimates
On December 6, the Office of the Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) unveiled its latest National Health Expenditures (NHE) estimates for 2017. There were several noteworthy findings related to the Medicaid program: Growth in overall Medicaid spending slowed to 2.9 percent in 2017, down from 4.2 percent in 2016. According…
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No Changes to Child Core Set of Health Care Quality Measures in Medicaid and CHIP for 2019
CMS has announced that the Child Core Set of Quality Measures in Medicaid and CHIP will remain the same for 2019. No new measures will be introduced, nor will any 2018 measures be retired. CMS is required to review the core measures annually, and does so in partnership with the National Quality Forum (NQF) and…
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Children’s Health Coverage Shrank In Utah Last Year, Reversing Decade-Long Growth
KUER 90.1 By: Erik Neumann For the first time in nearly a decade, fewer kids in Utah have health coverage, according to a new report from Georgetown University. KUER’s Erik Neumann spoke with Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families about the new report and what’s behind this trend.…
