Say Ahhh!
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Lawsuit Threatens Affordable Care Act Preexisting Condition Protections But Impact Will Depend on Where You Live
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been polarizing, but its provisions designed to help people obtain coverage regardless of health status are consistently popular. Nevertheless, ACA opponents continue to target the law’s pre-existing condition protections. On September 5, a federal district court in Texas will hear arguments in a lawsuit filed by Republican governors and attorneys general in…
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Medicaid Expansion: The Facts Are In
With 34 states (including DC) now expanding Medicaid since 2014 and 17 states still refusing expansion, the ability for researchers to compare patient experiences in these disparate two groups of states has resulted in literally hundreds of high-quality studies – a “natural experiment” created by the Supreme Court’s decision to make the expansion optional. A…
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Thousands of Arkansans Face Losing Health Coverage Due to New Red Tape Rules
[Editor’s Note: According to the latest press reports, more than 4,500 Arkansas Works enrollees lost their health coverage for failing to comply with the program’s work requirement for three months. CCF staff will continue to monitor this situation and update readers when more information is available.] Thousands of adults in Arkansas will likely lose their…
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Growth in Medicaid Participation Rates of Uninsured Children Slows, while Parent Participation Rates Stall
In 2016, the percent of eligible, uninsured children enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP inched up from 93.1 percent to 93.7 percent, according to a new report in Health Affairs from researchers at the Urban Institute. The six-tenths of a percent increase between 2015 and 2016 follows two years of annual gains of greater than two…
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Exciting News: CMS Announces First Innovation Model Grants Aimed at Children and Youth
CMS has announced that it will launch a new innovation model funding opportunity this fall as part of a multi-prong response to the opioid crisis. The Integrated Care for Kids (InCK) Model aims to reduce expenditures and improve the quality of care for children under 21 years of age covered by Medicaid and the Children’s…
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Medicaid and Early Learning: Complex Systems at Play in Washington State
Editor’s Note: Shannon Blood is the early learning and home visiting program manager in Washington’s Medicaid agency. We were excited to know of the state’s decision to dedicate a Medicaid staff to young children—even more exciting since Shannon came to the agency from the early learning sector. So we asked her to share her initial takeaways…
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Analysis of Ohio’s report on Medicaid expansion
On Tuesday, August 21, the Ohio Department of Medicaid (ODM) released the second “assessment” of the Medicaid expansion as a follow-up to the first, General Assembly required, assessment from 2016. In this document the ODM found the following: EMPLOYMENT Employment for enrollees went up 15%, meaning 1 in 2 expansion enrollees are working The most common reason for…
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CMS Receives Outpouring of Public Comments on Kentucky and Mississippi Medicaid Waivers (Including some from us here at CCF!)
The public has spoken! When the public comment period closed on the Kentucky and Mississippi Medicaid waivers this weekend, a whopping 11,700+ comments had been submitted on Kentucky’s and 330+ were submitted on Mississippi’s. While the Mississippi numbers were not as eye-popping as Kentucky’s, it’s important to view that number in context — as only…
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New Georgetown Report: Insurance Brokers’ Perspectives on Changes to Individual Health Insurance
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) ushered in a range of consumer protections designed to make it easier for individuals to obtain affordable, adequate health insurance in the individual market. In many states, however, individual market consumers have faced increasingly limited plan choices, relatively narrow provider networks, and rising unsubsidized premiums. In the past year, policy…
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After Two Months Under New Work Requirements, Thousands of Arkansans May Lose Medicaid Without Even Realizing the Rules Changed
Arkansas’s Department of Human Services released numbers on its work requirement late Tuesday and they continue to suggest that the rollout of the new work requirements policy is extremely flawed and that thousands could lose coverage by September 1. Since this is now the second month of the work requirement rollout, a large group of…
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Teens Discover Peer-to-Peer Outreach Works to Connect More Students with Health Coverage
This year the Tennessee Justice Center launched a Student Ambassador Program to engage young people in our Insure Our Kids Campaign. This campaign seeks to get every eligible child in Tennessee enrolled in health insurance coverage by educating the community and providing enrollment assistance. To find and enroll those uninsured students, we turned to their…
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Lawsuit Challenges Arkansas’s Medicaid Work Requirement
Back in 2014, Arkansas expanded Medicaid through a section 1115 demonstration waiver referred to as the ‘private option.’ Newly eligible Medicaid beneficiaries enrolled in private market plans on the ACA’s Marketplace and the state defrayed the costs and offered wrap-around benefits. A preliminary evaluation of the private option showed that Arkansas cut its uninsured rate…
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At Last, Some News on T-MSIS – the Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System
Say Ahhh! readers know that I am a fan of how technology can transform eligibility and significantly improve data collection and reporting. And I’ve been anxiously awaiting signs of progress on the Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System (T-MSIS) since CMS released an August 2013 letter to State Medicaid Directors indicating that the system was being piloted…
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Early Childhood Educators Support Children’s Healthy Development: Who is Meeting their Health Care Needs?
Early childhood educators care for our youngest children during the time of their most rapid brain growth. They help foster essential brain development that builds a foundation for children to learn and grow for the rest of their lives. But the teachers themselves often go without. Faced with low wages and limited workplace supports, many…
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Oklahoma’s Proposed Work Rule Would Harm Mothers and Children
Oklahoma has one of the highest uninsured rates for children in the nation, and the state will likely make matters worse if it gets a green light from CMS to go through with a plan to impose more red tape requirements on poor parents. Oklahoma is seeking approval to amend its Section 1115 demonstration waiver…
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New resources help states improve children’s oral health care following CMS bulletin
In May, CDHP expressed our excitement over a new informational bulletin from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). It clarifies the intent of existing federal policy to ensure children’s individualized benefits and care. The bulletin also reiterates expectations for state-level periodicity and payment policies that influence how care is provided in these programs. We see it…
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An Innovative Pilot Program to Provide Early Intervention for Illinois’ Lead Poisoned Children
Lead poisoning is the number one environmental health hazard affecting children. According to the CDC, over half a million children ages 1-5 have blood lead levels above 5 micrograms per deciliter, the reference level at which the CDC recommends public health actions be initiated. Yet, there is no known safe level of human exposure to…
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Proposed Fix to Harmful Medicaid Waivers Impacting Very Poor Parents in Alabama and Mississippi is no Fix at All
Both Alabama and Mississippi have submitted Medicaid Section 1115 waiver proposals that would impose work/community engagement requirements rules on poor parents and caregivers. Because these states have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act and have some of them most restrictive eligibility limits in the nation, most people facing loss of health coverage due…
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Indexing Capital Gains Would Add to Deficit, Adversely Impact State Budgets and Imperil Medicaid Funding
Even though the Trump Administration almost certainly lacks the authority to do so, press reports indicate that the Administration is considering issuing a new regulation to provide another large tax cut for the wealthy. The regulation would index capital gains for inflation, substantially lowering the amounts that would be subject to taxation. As the Center…
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Bracing for an ACA Enrollment Season Without Navigators: Risks for Consumers and the Market
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced on July 10, 2018 that they would fund up to $10 million for Navigator programs in the 34 federally facilitated marketplace (FFM) states in 2018, a 60 percent cut from 2017 funding levels, and an over 80 percent cut from the program’s original funding. CMS is also encouraging applicants to…
