Say Ahhh!
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Healthy Schools Campaign Webinar Looks at Importance of Medicaid to Student Success
Think fast: What the third largest stream of federal funding flowing into public schools? Since this is Say Ahhh!, you’re probably guessing Medicaid, and you’d be right. School districts across the country receive an estimated $4.5 billion in federal Medicaid dollars every year. That’s less than 1 percent of federal Medicaid spending, but in terms…
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New Initiative Could Undermine ACA Consumer Protections Under Guise of ‘Wellness Program’
Before the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was enacted, one of the primary ways insurance companies deterred less healthy people from enrolling was to charge them into a higher premium based on their expected health risk. The ACA prohibited this practice beginning in 2014. Health insurers in the individual market can now adjust premium rates solely based…
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Short-Term Funding Bill Keeps Government Open, Also Includes Sound Provision Reducing Federal and State Medicaid Drug Costs
On September 29, the President signed into law a fiscal year 2020 appropriations bill (H.R. 4378) that temporarily funds the federal government through November 21. The bill also includes several short-term extensions of critical health provisions that were scheduled to expire: full Medicaid funding for Puerto Rico and the other territories, a delay in scheduled…
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Medicaid Managed Care Transparency: A Leap Forward
The California Health Care Foundation has just issued a path-breaking report that marks an important step forward on the road to full transparency about Medicaid managed care. The report, prepared by Dr. Andrew Bindman and his colleagues at the University of California at San Francisco, examines the performance of managed care plans (MCPs) in Medi-Cal…
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Boosting Outreach and Consumer Assistance to Regain Enrollment Momentum
See our full blog series on evidence-based policies available to policymakers to prevent more eligible children from losing health coverage. As Say Ahhh! readers know, in May, we released a comprehensive report showing that child enrollment dropped by nearly 1 million children in 38 states in 2018 and have continued to track the growing enrollment…
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Tennessee Medicaid “Block Grant” Proposal: Imagination Gone Wild
The Tennessee Medicaid agency has posted a proposal to convert a portion of its federal funding to a “block grant.” The proposal, which responds to a directive from the Tennessee State Legislature, takes the form of an amendment to the state’s current section 1115 demonstration, which expires at the end of June 2021. The state…
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Policy Options: How to Regain Momentum on Medicaid/CHIP Enrollment
See our full blog series on evidence-based policies available to policymakers to prevent more eligible children from losing health coverage. As Say Ahhh! readers know, we began reporting on the precipitous drop in Medicaid and CHIP enrollment earlier this year after child enrollment had declined by more than half a million kids, which has now…
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Gaps in Coverage for Pregnant Women and New Moms Need Attention, Research Finds
Cycling in and out of health coverage is a problem no matter the stage of life, but is especially harmful for women in the time before, during and after pregnancy. According to a new blog from researchers Jamie R. Daw, Katy B. Kozhimannil and Lindsay K. Admon in Health Affairs, about 34 percent of women…
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Research Update: Uninsured Children with Mental Health Emergencies Experience Higher Odds of Hospital Transfer
This week, I am reading a study from researchers at the University of California Davis’ Departments of Pediatrics and Psychiatry, which uses a national data sample from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project 2014 Nationwide Emergency Department Sample (NEDS) to investigate the association between types of child health coverage and hospital decisions to admit or…
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“Intentional Program Violations” (IPVs): Weaponizing Program Integrity to Undercut Medicaid Expansion
Last November, Utah voters passed an initiative calling for Medicaid expansion. Since then, Utah policymakers have been fighting a convoluted battle against covering low-income adults that has been chronicled by my colleagues Joan Alker, Adam Searing, and Kelly Whitener. The latest chapter in this saga is Utah’s “per capita cap” waiver, which is now before…
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CHIR Launches New Resource Center for Policymakers on Surprise Medical Bills
Surprise medical bills result in financial hardship for millions of Americans and top the list of health care costs that Americans are afraid they will not be able to afford. This is one reason why Congress and states are considering legislation to ban surprise medical bills once and for all. Thanks to the generous support…
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How Can Policymakers Stop More Children From Losing Health Coverage and Regain Enrollment Momentum?
See our full blog series on evidence-based policies available to policymakers to prevent more eligible children from losing health coverage. Sometimes you just hate to be right. The release of topline Census data last week confirmed our fears that the most recent health insurance data would reveal that we lost ground in providing health coverage…
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The Future of Coverage for American Indian and Alaska Native Children
As you may possibly have heard by now, the uninsured rate for children is heading in the wrong direction. It increased from 5 percent in 2017 to 5.5 percent in 2018, which translates into an additional 425,000 uninsured children. Among the children whom this trend likely affects are American Indians and Alaska Natives, but we…
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Why are There More Uninsured Kids and What Can We Do About It?
Yesterday the Census Bureau released one of its annual surveys (the Current Population Survey or CPS), which looks at health insurance status. This year, in an unusual move, the Bureau actually released a mini special report focusing on children. While we await more data at the end of the month from the American Community Survey…
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US Census: 425,000 More Uninsured Children
Statement by Joan Alker, in response to Current Population Survey data released by the U.S. Census Bureau today showing that the number of uninsured children increased by 425,000, and the uninsured rate increased by 0.6 percentage points to 5.5 percent in 2018. “Data released by the U.S. Census Bureau today confirm our worst fears. An…
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State Flexibility Has Its Limits — Even for the Trump Administration
Like many others, I was out of Washington for the second half of August. That tends to be the period of time when Administrations publicly announce decisions they want buried. And when it comes to Medicaid waivers, the timing may not have been intentional, but what happened in August is worth unearthing to examine more…
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Preparing for the Release of the American Community Survey Data and the New Census Data Tool
This week, we are preparing for the release of the first batch of health insurance data from the 2018 American Community Survey (ACS) on September 10, 2019 via the U.S. Census Bureau’s new platform Data.Census.Gov. Typically the Census releases ACS data online in several ways: the annual Census reports on income, poverty and health insurance…
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Repealing the Medicaid Access Rule is Bad News for Children and Providers
On July 15, CMS proposed to repeal—but not replace—the Access Rule. Repeal of this important rule will leave children in Medicaid fee-for-service, as well as their providers, with no systematic assessment of their access to services and no procedural protections against arbitrary payment cuts. (This could be especially problematic in the event of a recession,…
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Advancing Early Relational Health in Child Health and Communities: Opportunities for Medicaid Support
Early relational health (ERH) is a dynamic concept that has emerged in the last few years from leaders in pediatrics, public health, early childhood mental health, and child health policy. ERH elevates the primacy of the earliest relational experiences and interactions between infants and their caregivers that builds the foundations for health, learning, and social…
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What Has Happened to the 1+ Million Children Who Have Lost Medicaid/CHIP Coverage?
The Census Bureau is expected to release topline findings from the American Community Survey next week that will include 2018 data on uninsured children. We have been anxiously awaiting these data since we first alerted Medicaid/CHIP stakeholders to the precipitous decline in Medicaid/CHIP early this year. Since then we have continued to monthly monitor enrollment…
