Resources
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CMS Asks Florida ‘Where’s the Beef’? (Do States Need a Waiver to do Managed Care?)
Last week the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services sent a letter to the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration in response to the state’s request for waiver authority to expand managed care statewide. CMS responded by saying that their Medicaid waiver extension request cannot be granted because it lacks a specific plan. The state’s…
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Presumptive Eligibility: Providing Access to Health Care Without Delay and Connecting Children to Coverage
Presumptive eligibility is a state policy option that gives states the flexibility to train health care providers, schools and other community-based organizations and programs to screen eligibility and temporarily enroll eligible persons in Medicaid and CHIP. Currently 31 states use presumptive eligibility for pregnant women and 16 states enroll children presumptively. The following issue brief…
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Senator Hatch Launches Effort to Repeal MoE: Could Lead to Deep Cuts in CHIP
By Jocelyn Guyer Yesterday, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) introduced a bill to repeal the Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) stability protections or “maintenance-of-effort requirements.” In the House, the same legislation was introduced by Phil Gingrey (R-GA). Although Senator Hatch had warned for a long time this bill would be coming, it is still…
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Groups Develop Public Comments on Section 1332 Innovation Waiver Regs (aka Wyden Waivers)
A working group consisting of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Georgetown CCF, Families USA, and NHelp, with input from the National Women’s Law Center, NCQA and SEIU have produced comments on the proposed Section 1332 State Innovation waiver public process regulations issued by CMS on March 14, 2011. Take a look at the…
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Alphabet Soup: ACOs under ACA
By Joe Touschner We’ve long been familiar with CHIP and FMAP, while health reform has given us PPACA (ACA for short) and CLASS. You’ve probably also heard a lot recently about ACOs–Accountable Care Organizations which may be the concept of the year for many of our friends in the physician, hospital, and insurance communities. (Atul…
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Colorado Takes Step to Eliminate ‘Stair Step’
By Gretchen Hammer, Colorado Coalition for the Medically Underserved Some people say stair stepping is good for your health. Well, that may be true when you are exercising, but it is not true for families with children enrolled in public health insurance programs in Colorado. Currently, a Colorado family can have kids on two different…
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HHS Engages Communities to Address Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities
HHS’s National Partnership for Action to End Health Disparities (a project of the Office of Minority Health) recently hosted a conference call announcing a new new initiative focused on reducing health disparities in the U.S. The National Stakeholder Strategy for Achieving Health Equity was developed after engaging communities across the country around the priorities and…
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CMS Continues to Invest in and Support Innovation and State Flexibility in Medicaid
Regardless of who pays for health care services, the U.S. health care system is in desperate need of dramatic change to make it the best it can be – affordable, sustainable and focused on outcomes – without leaving millions of Americans, mostly low-income or those with existing health conditions, uninsured. The good news is that…
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Kansas Eliminates Backlog with Commonsense Solutions to Improve Efficiency
By Suzanne Wikle, Kansas Action for Children Lately it seems hard to find good news about Medicaid, but here in the heartland we have some truly wonderful news about our Medicaid and CHIP program, collectively known as HealthWave. As of late March, an enrollment backlog that topped 30,000 applications at one time, has been eliminated…
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Obama Offers More Balanced Deficit Reduction Plan
“I will preserve these health care programs as a promise we make to each other in this society. I will not allow Medicare to become a voucher program that leaves seniors at the mercy of the insurance industry, with a shrinking benefit to pay for rising costs. I will not tell families with children who…
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90/10 Rule is Final: Time to Upgrade to a More Reliable & Efficient Model
Remember driving an older model car that generally got you from point A to point B but not without stalling at a traffic light or having the heater cut out in the dead of winter? That‘s a bit like the old, tired legacy systems currently being used to determine eligibility for Medicaid (and other programs)…
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Transparency in Medicaid/CHIP Waivers is Urgent
Today 34 national groups sent a letter to Secretary Sibelius asking her to finalize the Section 1115 Medicaid and CHIP public process waiver regulations as soon as possible. As the letter notes, state Medicaid waiver activity is a hot topic these days. The Secretary and her colleagues at the U.S. Department of Health and Human…
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What If Ryan’s Medicaid Block Grant Were Already in Effect?
By Edwin Park, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities The Congressional Budget Office has found that House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s proposal to block-grant Medicaid would significantly shift costs to states, beneficiaries, and health care providers. To help illustrate how states would likely fare under the proposal over time, the Center on Budget and…
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Tapping Medicaid Performance Funds – No Need to Worry
By Jocelyn Guyer Today, we finally saw details of the continuing resolution to fund the federal government through the end of fiscal year 2011. One item that jumped out at us is a proposal to take $3.5 billion of the money that had been set aside for “performance bonuses” to reward states for enrolling kids…
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Guidance Issued on CHIP Eligibility for Children of State Employees
For years federal funding was not available to states to enroll eligible children of state employees in the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). It was assumed that state employees had access to affordable, comprehensive insurance but, over time, that myth has been dispelled. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) sought to remedy this but it took…
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Medicaid Block Grant Proposal Would Impact Pregnant Women
By Amanda Jezek, March of Dimes House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s recently released 2012 budget resolution was passed by the committee and is expected to be considered by the full House of Representatives this week. It includes a proposal to convert the federal share of the Medicaid program into capped block grants to states.…
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The Ryan Budget Resolution – Implications for Children’s Coverage
By Jocelyn Guyer Yesterday, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) released a lopsided budget plan that harms the most vulnerable and protects the most secure. It would radically alter Medicaid and shift costs to the states by changing Medicaid to a block grant and deeply slashing federal funding for the program by $771 billion…
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Using CHIPRA Bonus Payments in Advocacy
Jon Gould, Children’s Alliance While celebrating the anniversary of the Affordable Care Act last month, I couldn’t help but think how vital CHIPRA’s passage was a year before the ACA – in February 2009. With President Obama’s signature on the five-year children’s health reauthorization law came a powerful new tool in our advocacy toolbox: annual…
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Understanding Florida Medicaid Today And the Impact of Federal Health Care Reform
Sound information on Florida’s Medicaid program is especially timely because of the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which will move more low-income people into Medicaid by expanding eligibility levels in 2014. The highly politicized nature of the debate about Medicaid and health reform has lead to some exaggerated state estimates of Florida’s cost…
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Senate Approves Bill to Change ACA’s 1099 Reporting Requirements
The Senate passed H.R. 4 today to remove the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced 1099 reporting requirements. President Obama has not yet indicated whether or not he will sign the bill into law. The White House supports the bill’s goal of eliminating the enhanced reporting requirements for businesses but has expressed concerns about the offset that was included…