Say Ahhh!
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Delaying Care: Treatment Effects of High Cost Sharing
By Keanan Lane A recent study appearing in JAMA provides further insight into the effects of cost sharing on patients with chronic illnesses, finding that higher amounts resulted in greater delays of necessary treatments. Parents were surveyed about financial pressure they felt in treating their children’s asthma and whether, in the presence of financial pressure,…
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Lessons Learned from CHIP Can Apply to Next Phase of ACA
By Gene Lewit The open enrollment period for Marketplace coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has ended and supporters of the legislation are finished celebrating the accomplishment of exceeding enrollment goals despite a rocky start. Nonetheless, this continues to be an important time for ACA outreach and enrollment efforts. Enrollment in Medicaid and the…
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New Survey by Enroll America Provides Insights into ACA Implementation
A new PerryUndem survey commissioned by Enroll America and funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation contributes new information to the discussion about the Affordable Care Act. It’s a fairly extensive survey and I encourage you to read it in full if you have time. What I found most interesting was the positive response to…
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CHIP Financing Basics #1 – Federal CHIP Funding Structure
As we at CCF begin to dig into the future of CHIP—which stands to go away if funds are not renewed before next September—we thought it would make sense to refresh Say Ahhh! readers (and ourselves!) about how the financing works so we can more thoughtfully contemplate what happens if Congress does or does not…
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New Rules Protect Navigators and Certified Application Counselors from Over-Reaching State Laws but Also Impose New Requirements
Last week, CMS finalized rules that were proposed in March with a few modifications, some good and some not so good. The rules impact navigators, in-person assisters and certified application counselors (CACs) (collectively known as assisters) as summarized below. 1) Pre-empting certain aspects of state laws that restrict navigator and assisters. States are not precluded…
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Protecting Medicaid Kids at Renewal
By Martha Heberlein As my colleague, Tricia Brooks, noted a few weeks ago, MAGI-based renewals are upon us in many states (save those that have delayed them, which we talked more about in a separate blog). And buried within the ACA is a little-known provision that specifically protects children who were enrolled in Medicaid (but…
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How Are We Really Doing on Enrollment in California? Good Data Reporting Will Help Us Find Out
By Kristen Golden Testa, The Children’s Partnership California’s basic enrollment numbers coming out of the first open enrollment period under ACA are quite astounding: about 1.4 million Californians enrolled in Covered California, our state-based marketplace, and 1.9 million enrolled in Medi-Cal, for a whopping total of more than 3 million enrolled. But what’s going on…
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Governor Pence Announces Plans to Expand Medicaid to Hoosiers in the Coverage Gap through Healthy Indiana 2.0
In what I think is a very significant political development, Governor Mike Pence announced his intention to submit a Section 1115 Medicaid waiver proposal to the federal government by the end of June, which would extend coverage to the newly eligible parents and adults below 133% of the federal poverty line. One reason Indiana was…
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Health Coverage for Immigrant Children and Families? Two New Studies Support Moving Forward
Two new studies published in Health Affairs support state efforts to expand coverage for immigrant children and families. Coverage for immigrant kids and pregnant women In 2009, the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act provided a new opportunity for states to receive federal funding to cover lawfully present low-income kids and pregnant women in Medicaid…
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Delaying Renewals – Still an Option for States
By Martha Heberlein An option provided by CMS to states to delay renewals so that they wouldn’t be running eligibility the old and new way, has a second purpose as states face processing back logs and fixing systems glitches. Taking a step back – the ACA requires that existing beneficiaries be protected against losing coverage…
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The Expatriate Health Coverage Act: Like “Using a Bat to Swat a Fly?”
The National Immigration Law Center has said that the Expatriate Health Coverage Clarification Act of 2014 (H. R. 4414 as amended or “EHCCA”), which passed the House last week, is “like using a bat to swat a fly.” I agree that this analogy fits. The EHCCA professes to fix a problem with health coverage for…
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CHIP Enrollees Gain Same Mandate Accommodation as QHP Enrollees
By Joe Touschner Months ago, CMS clarified that those who signed up for a qualified health plan by the end of open enrollment would not face a tax penalty for lacking coverage in early 2014, even if their plans were not effective until May 1. This was necessary since the mandate exemption for a short…
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Crossing Into New Territory with 25,000 Newly Covered Kids
By Anna Strong, Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families At Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, we’ve been working for many years to ensure that all children have health coverage here in our state. Our latest report, Crossing into New Territory: Kids’ Health Coverage in 2014, outlines the progress Arkansas has made in covering kids since…
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What Would Happen if CHIP Went Away? Our Research Suggests Kids (for now) Would be Significantly Worse Off
While the eyes of the world have been intently focused on the success or failure of the Affordable Care Act, an important question has recently surfaced in the policy debate by the Medicaid and CHIP Payment Access Commission (MACPAC, — the group legislatively tasked with making recommendations on Medicaid and CHIP to policymakers): Should the Children’s…
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What’s Missing in Monthly CMS Medicaid and CHIP Enrollment Report?
It’s really good to know we can count on the monthly reports from CMS to keep tabs on Medicaid and CHIP application and enrollment activity. Since CMS released the first data in January, we’ve seen improvements in the number of states reporting, and enrollment data was added to the initial report of application volume and…
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Without CHIP, Low-Income Arizona Families Face High Costs for Children’s Health Coverage
Before the Affordable Care Act (ACA) became law, Arizona began the process of dismantling its CHIP program when it froze enrollment in KidsCare in January 2010. Enrollment was temporarily reinstated in May 2012, extending coverage to 47,000 children at the peak of KidsCare II. Thanks to the ACA’s alignment of children’s Medicaid eligibility across all…
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CCF-NASHP Report Details CHIP Benefits and Cost Sharing and Considers ACA Context
By Joe Touschner (CCF) and Joanne Jee (NASHP) We know CHIP gives millions of children access to affordable health coverage, but what exactly does it cover? Because of the flexibility built into the CHIP law, the answer varies by state—states can choose both the benefits and the cost sharing in their separate CHIP programs, as…
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Illinois Keeps Its Eye on the Back Door: Medicaid Renewals
By Stephanie Altman, Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law In Illinois, we’ve been busy enrolling more than 260,000 newly eligible adults through Medicaid’s front door. But we’ve also had our eye on Medicaid’s back door to make sure we don’t lose Medicaid-eligibles through the annual renewal process. The state has been working with us…
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Florida Legislature Adjourns with Unfinished Medicaid Business: Federal Hospital Funding to Run Out in 2015 Putting the Pressure on For Next Year
The Florida legislature adjourned for 2014 without accepting the federal Medicaid funding on the table to extend coverage to as many as a million Floridians who would have been eligible. According to the state’s Social Services Estimating Conference, for the current fiscal year (which will end on June 30, the state could have received $1,258,054,808…
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Washington State’s Hard Work on Medicaid Renewals Pays Off
As part of my colleague’s blog series on renewals, I wanted to share how hard work is paying off on Medicaid renewals in Washington state. Washington is among the first states in the country to get started on MAGI-based renewals. What are MAGI-based renewals? Just like new applications, renewals in Medicaid will be based on…