Say Ahhh!
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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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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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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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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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CMS Posts New Medicaid and CHIP Application Processing Time Report
Say Ahhh! readers know that I have long been frustrated at the delay in releasing state-level performance indicator data in Medicaid and CHIP. While CMS has posted enrollment and application data for some time, data on the remaining performance indicators – which were announced in September 2013 (that’s more than five years ago!) – have…
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The Importance of Medicaid to Kentucky’s Rural Areas is Eye Popping
In 2017, we embarked on a new project with the Rural Health Research Program at the University of North Carolina Sheps Center for Health Services Research to examine the role of Medicaid in rural areas and small towns. In our first report, Medicaid is a Lifeline for Small Towns and Rural Communities, we highlighted the…
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Proposed Changes to Medicaid Managed Care Rule Will Reduce Access to Providers
One year ago, CMS Administrator Seema Verma gave a major policy address to state Medicaid directors in which she promised to “rollback burdensome regulations that the federal government has imposed on states.” She specifically targeted two, both of which were issued by the prior administration: the Access Rule (November 2015), and the Managed Care Rule…
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Military Kids Need Medicaid Too
By: LCDR Anthony P. Putney, USN (ret.) — Father and caregiver to Lily I’m a veteran of the United States Navy, a nurse and parent to four children along with my wife, Carie. I work hard today to provide for my family, and I spent 23 years in active service to the nation. Knowing all this,…
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Another Place for Medicaid Attention: Young Children’s Social Emotional Development
Early childhood mental health is not as widely understood and does not look the same as mental health challenges for older children or adults. But there’s good news: effective, evidence-informed, and promising interventions that support infant and toddlers’ mental health are available. That’s where Medicaid can help. Our latest paper, Using Medicaid to Ensure the…
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New Report Shows Progress on Children’s Health Coverage Reversed Course
[Editor’s Note: For the most recent Georgetown University Center for Children and Families report on children’s health coverage and an interactive version of the report with state-by-state data, click here.] For the past eight years, CCF has published a report tracking health coverage rates for children across the country. This year, for the first time…
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Midterm Elections Improve Prospects for Medicaid Expansion in North Carolina
The loss of Republican supermajorities in the North Carolina House and Senate in the recent midterms was the first sign of an improving climate for expanding Medicaid in the Tarheel state. Now when Democratic Governor Roy Cooper exercises his veto power, Democrats in the legislature can block legislation – including the annual state budget bill…
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Surprise! CMS Approves Kentucky Work Requirement Waiver Again
Yesterday, CMS reapproved the Kentucky work requirement waiver. The reapproval comes less than two weeks after Congress’s Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC) wrote a letter to the Secretary of HHS asking for a pause in disenrollments resulting from the Arkansas work requirement waiver, less than a week after Arkansas announced that over…
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Louisiana Medicaid Audit Report Misses the Mark
A recent legislative audit of the adult Medicaid expansion in Louisiana compares apples and oranges to arrive at a conclusion that millions of dollars were paid on behalf of Medicaid enrollees who did not qualify. But is it accurate to characterize these individuals as ineligible? No, not when you consider the flexibility states have in…
