Say Ahhh!
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COVID “Long Haulers” Can Carry Additional Burden of Getting Insurers to Cover Care
By Karen Davenport As Americans return, retreat, and return again to schools, workplaces, and other locations emblematic of pre-pandemic times, life is anything but normal for millions of people experiencing the long-term after-effects of COVID-19. Post-viral syndromes, which develop when a reaction to a virus fails to resolve following initial infection, followed the 1918 flu pandemic, SARS, and other viral…
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What’s New for 2022 Marketplace Enrollment?
Open Enrollment is just around the corner. There are new policies for the marketplace in 2022, including an expansion of opportunities to sign up for health coverage during and outside the annual open enrollment period. There are also new opportunities to get financial help with the enactment of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act. Here…
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Retroactive Coverage Should Not Be Waived in Florida or Anywhere Else: Florida’s Own Evaluation Makes That Clear
We recently submitted public comments on Florida’s amendment to its Section 1115 waiver which has a medley of requests for the federal government to consider. On the plus side, the state is seeking to extend postpartum coverage from 60 days to 12 months (although it is unclear why they need a waiver). But on the…
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Congressional Proposals to Address the Maternal Health Crisis Offer a Promising Roadmap for Change
By: Kay Johnson, MEd, MPH and Laurie Zephyrin, M.D., M.P.H., M.B.A. Maternal health and maternal mortality are the subject of more than three dozen bills introduced in the first six months of the 117th Congress, and many of their provisions were included in the House reconciliation package currently under consideration. Building on proposals in the…
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National Children’s Provider Groups Declare State of Emergency in Children’s Mental Health
This week, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children’s Hospital Association joined together to declare a National State of Emergency in Children’s Mental Health. As previously discussed here on Say Ahhh!, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken an unprecedented toll on children’s mental health, further exacerbating long…
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New Report Highlights Coverage and Affordability Improvements for Children and Families with Permanent Marketplace Subsidies
More than 2.5 million Americans enrolled in Marketplace coverage between February 15 and July 31, 2021 during the recent COVID-19 special enrollment period (which closed on August 15, 2021). About 35 percent of these individuals were able to get covered for under $10 per month, thanks in part to the American Rescue Plan Act’s enhanced…
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Covid-19 Exposed Many Inequities for Latino Families, Adopting Continuous Eligibility Would Repair Cracks and Protect More Latino Kids from Losing Medicaid/CHIP
COVID-19 underscores the need for universal access to health care and exposes the coverage inequities in our system today. Latino children are more likely to be uninsured than their non-Latino peers, and this coverage gap widened in recent years. A new report from CCF and UnidosUS shows that because Latino children are more likely to be…
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Medicaid Continuous Coverage Extended with Renewal of the PHE
The Biden administration has extended the public health emergency (PHE) for 90 days, from October 18, 2021 through January 16, 2022. What does this mean for Medicaid? First, the maintenance of effort provisions in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act remain in effect until January 31, 2022 (the end of the month after the PHE…
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Research Update: Medicaid/CHIP Are Critical Resources for Children with Special Health Care Needs
Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) together provide coverage for nearly half of the 13.9 million children with special health care needs, who have or are at higher risk of developing chronic conditions and have greater health care needs than children overall. As Congress considers additional funding to improve and expand Medicaid home…
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Kids with Gaps in Coverage Have Less Access to Care
Last week, we blogged about the 1 in 10 children who were uninsured at some point during the course of the recent uptick in uninsured children and how requiring 12-month continuous eligibility in both Medicaid and CHIP could help reduce racial, income, and geographic disparities in kids’ insurance coverage. This week, we’re taking another look…
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New Toolkit Highlights ARPA Funding Opportunities for Maternal and Early Childhood Health Priorities
The American Rescue Plan made billions available for state and local governments to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, including significant investments in programs that support children and families. The National Collaborative for Infants and Toddlers (BUILD) recently released an important new toolkit to help state advocates and policymakers make sense of funding opportunities through the…
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One Year of Postpartum Medicaid and CHIP Coverage Included in House Budget Reconciliation Plan
An important policy change to advance maternal health equity secured a spot in the Build Back Better Act, the budget reconciliation legislation currently under consideration in Congress. Pregnant people covered by Medicaid and CHIP would receive a full year of postpartum coverage, regardless of which state they live in. The bill requires that all states…
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Medicaid Managed Care for Foster Care Children and Youth: A Natural Experiment with Little Transparency
There’s a natural experiment underway involving a highly vulnerable population: children and youth in foster care. The experiment is a test of whether MCO/FCs outperform other ways of furnishing needed health care to this population. No, MCO/FCs are not a soccer team in the English Premier League. The initialism stands for Medicaid managed care organizations…
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MACPAC Research Shows Closing the Continuous Coverage Gap for Kids is Within Reach
I was delighted to see MACPAC’s recent examination of continuous coverage and churn in Medicaid and CHIP. It was the first such analysis I’ve seen using data from the Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System (T-MSIS) from 42 states and D.C. While the analysis includes all non-elderly Medicaid enrollees, I’m going to focus mostly on the…
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Why is Medicaid/CHIP Continuous Eligibility So Important for Kids?
As readers of SayAhhh! know, the number of uninsured kids was going down for many years, but during the Trump administration starting going back up – rising to 5.7 percent child uninsured rate in 2019. While children are insured at higher rates than non-elderly adults, they still lag considerably behind seniors – who with Medicare…
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Retroactive Coverage Waivers: Coverage Lost and Nothing Learned
If you took cooking classes for more than two decades but still couldn’t boil water, wouldn’t you reconsider your lesson plan? Using section 1115 demonstrations, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) can grant states waivers of federal Medicaid requirements, if and only if, the waivers enable the states to conduct health coverage experiments…
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A Round-Up of Current Child Health Dashboards
As regular readers may know, we at CCF are big fans of a good dashboard to highlight Medicaid/CHIP data. Well-designed dashboards can pack a wealth of information about a state’s enrollment, quality of care, utilization rates, and managed care performance into a central and easily accessible location. Dashboards also provide transparency, which can help level…
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Building a Better Transparency Mousetrap: Recommendations to Optimize Hospital and Health Plan Price Disclosures
By Sabrina Corlette, Megan Houston, Maanasa Kona, Rachel Schwab, and Nia Gooding from the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute. High and rising health care costs are projected to consume 20 percent of the U.S. economy by 2027, squeezing workers’ wages, reducing our economic competitiveness, and forcing difficult budgeting decisions for federal and…
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New Medicaid State Planning Grants for Mobile Crisis Intervention Services
This week, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that it awarded $15 million in planning grants to 20 state Medicaid agencies to support expanding access to community-based mobile crisis intervention services for Medicaid beneficiaries. As mentioned in our previous blog, the American Rescue Plan created a new state option for state Medicaid…
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Loss of Medicaid After the PHE Will Likely Exceed 15 Million Estimated by Urban
The Urban Institute recently released a new report projecting that Medicaid and CHIP will have provided access to health care (and peace of mind) for an additional 17 million children and adults by the end of 2021. The increase is largely due to the COVID-related requirement that states keep Medicaid enrollees continuously covered during the…
