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Say Ahhh!

  • Trump Administration Hands States Another Tool for Dismantling Preexisting Condition Protections

    CCFadmin

    Last week, the Trump administration issued long-anticipated guidance regarding the Affordable Care Act’s Section 1332 “innovation waiver” program. The release rebrands and creatively reimagines the ACA program (they’re now “State Relief and Empowerment” waivers), breaking dramatically with past policy and, arguably, with the statute it purports to interpret. In the administration’s view, the ACA permits states to…

  • Advocates Have a Key Role to Play Encouraging Early Childhood Sector to Leverage Medicaid to Meet Children’s Developmental Needs

    Maggie Clark

    Medicaid and early childhood care providers, including Head Start, child care centers, and home visiting programs, serve many of the same low-income children, yet the two systems rarely collaborate to improve overall population health. Reaching vulnerable children in their early years of physical, social and emotional development is essential to setting them on a path…

  • More Rural Hospitals Closing in States Refusing Medicaid Coverage Expansion

    Adam Searing

    The University of North Carolina’s Rural Health Research Program tracks closures of rural hospitals across the country. From 2010 to the present there are six states with five or more rural hospital closures. Texas leads with a stunning 15 rural hospitals closed, followed closely by Tennessee (9 rural hospitals closed) and Georgia (7 rural hospitals…

  • States Lean In as the Federal Government Cuts Back: Navigator and Advertising Funding for the ACA’s Sixth Open Enrollment

    Sabrina Corlette

    On November 1, the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) insurance marketplaces will launch their sixth enrollment season. This year, the challenges they face may be greater than laster year, with the loss of the individual mandate penalty as an enrollment incentive and the emergence of a parallel, unregulated market that could siphon away healthy enrollees. Yet the Trump administration has…

  • Medicaid Work Requirement Waivers: Time for CMS to Hit the Pause Button

    Joan Alker

    Yesterday members of the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC – a Congressional agency) received a briefing from staff on the implementation of the Arkansas work requirement waiver. Staff reviewed the latest data from the state as well as the findings from their own inquiries to various stakeholders.  The presentation confirmed my reading…

  • Are you Ready for Open Enrollment? Updated Navigator Resource Guide will Help You Understand Policy Changes

    JoAnn Volk

    On November 1, the sixth open enrollment period begins for marketplace coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We at the Georgetown University Center on Health Insurance Reforms will soon re-launch our updated Navigator Resource Guide, made possible by the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The Guide provides information on recent policy changes, a list of enrollment…

  • The MOM Model: New CMS Initiative Aims to Improve Systems of Care for Pregnant and Postpartum Women with Opioid Use Disorder

    Candace Webb

    The CMS Innovation Center announced a new tool to help address the devastating impact our nation’s growing opioid crisis is having on pregnant and postpartum women and their infants. The Maternal Opioid Misuse (MOM) model is the latest approach in CMS’s strategy to tackle the opioid crisis in a key population group, expectant and new…

  • How Would Medicaid Provisions of New Law to Address Opioid Epidemic  Impact Children?

    Andy Schneider

    Today President Trump signed the “SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act” into law. SUPPORT is an acronym for “Substance Use—Disorder Prevention that Promotes Opioid Recovery and Treatment.” The bill, which passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in both the House (396-14) and the Senate (98-1), is 250 pages long. It affects a broad array of federal…

  • What Medicaid Can Do for Our Nation’s Youngest Children

    Elisabeth Wright Burak

    The science is clear: We have a critical opportunity to reach young children during a period of rapid development, with the brain forming one million new neural connections every second. These earliest years are full of possibilities equally as powerful as the vulnerabilities that greatly influence children’s lifelong trajectories. Anyone who’s had the pleasure of chatting…

  • Arkansas Numbers Tell the Story: Trump’s Medicaid Work Requirement Policy Promotes Coverage Losses not Work

    Joan Alker

    Like many folks who work on Medicaid policy, we’ve been paying close attention to what is happening in Arkansas – the first state in the country to implement a work activities reporting requirement in Medicaid.[1] Earlier this week, the second round of data was released by the state documenting that another 4,109 Medicaid beneficiaries lost…

  • Proposed “Public Charge” Rule Risks Immigrants’ Access to Private Coverage, Too

    Sabrina Corlette

    On October 10, the Trump administration published a proposed rule that significantly harms immigrant families, in part by dramatically reducing their access to health coverage and care. As our Center for Children & Families (CCF) colleague Kelly Whitener has documented on our sister blog (CCF’s Say Ahhh!), the so-called “Public Charge” rule would make it far more difficult…

  • The Trump Administration’s Association Health Plans Emerge: What Early Announcements Tell Us About this New Market

    CCFadmin

    This past summer, the Department of Labor (DOL) finalized a regulation calling for the expansion of association health plans (AHPs) for small businesses and self-employed individuals. AHPs are insurance policies offered through an association, often to members within a specific trade, industry, or profession. Among other changes, DOL’s rule loosened the requirements under which a group of employers…

  • Administration Moves Forward with Proposed Public Charge Regulation; Comments Due in December

    Kelly Whitener

    As we have long suspected, the Administration is moving forward with a proposed regulation to dramatically change our immigration system and significantly harm immigrant families. The Department of Homeland Security posted a draft version of the rule about two weeks ago, and just this morning the rule was finally posted for inspection in the Federal…

  • Urban Institute Updates Uninsurance and Medicaid/CHIP Participation Data for Children and Parents

    Tricia Brooks

    Several weeks ago, I blogged about a Health Affairs article by Urban Institute researchers that updated the Medicaid and CHIP participation rates for children and parents. Over time, an increasing share of eligible children without other coverage have been enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP, reaching a high of 93.7 percent in 2016, up from 88.7…

  • New Podcast Spotlights Barriers to Health Care for Georgia’s Children

    Candace Webb

    Voices for Georgia’s Children has launched an inaugural podcast series — Challenges for Children – focused on barriers to health care for children. In April 2018, the Voices for Georgia’s Children team set out to find out why so many of their state’s children were being left behind. Team members traveled to Whitfield, Dougherty, Effingham,…

  • Developmental Screening Rates Improving for Most States Reporting Child Core Set Measure

    Elisabeth Wright Burak

    We were thrilled to see release of the latest Child Core Set measures late last week. Say Ahhh! readers know we are closely following this state-reported data as a means to measure quality of care for children—especially since states will be required to report all Child Core Set measures starting in 2024, thanks to the…

  • New Recommendations for the Child Core Set of Quality Measures in Medicaid and CHIP

    Tricia Brooks

    Recently, the National Quality Forum (NQF) released its annual report on opportunities to strengthen the child core set of quality measures in Medicaid and CHIP. The initial core set was released in 2010 and its underlying legislative mandate requires CMS to update the core set annually. NQF partners with CMS and a multi-stakeholder Medicaid workgroup…

  • 2017 Child Core Set of Health Care Quality Indicators in Medicaid and CHIP Released

    Tricia Brooks

    The results of state reporting on the 2017 Child Core Set of Health Care Quality Measures in Medicaid and CHIP have been released by CMS. The 2017 Child Core Set includes 27 measures that assess key aspects of health care access for children and pregnant women. While reporting on last year’s core set seems timely,…

  • Children Struggle to Access Autism Treatment

    Guest

      By Julie Kornack, Center for Autism and Related Disorders With a prevalence of 1 in every 59 children, autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has become increasingly commonplace. In turn, the growing autism advocacy community has been extraordinarily effective in engendering the political will to enact laws intended to ensure that individuals with ASD have access…