Say Ahhh!
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How to Make Proper Payments to Out-of-State Providers for Medicaid Children with Special Health Care Needs
As readers of Say Ahhh! Blog know, Medicaid covers over 35 million children, more than any other health insurer. And as readers also know, Medicaid does not exclude children with pre-existing conditions. In fact, having a disability is one pathway to Medicaid eligibility for a child. As a result, an estimated 2 million “medically complex” children…
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What Does Public Charge Mean for Immigrant Families?
If you’ve been following news reports about federal immigration policy, you’ve been busy – there is a lot going on. Some changes to immigration rules went into effect with little fanfare (see NILC’s summary of the updates to the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual with instructions for US embassies deciding whether to grant immigrant and…
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Expanding Short-Term Health Plans Will Gut Consumer Protections & Hurt Children and Families
Get sick on the weekend? Catch an injury playing a sport? Have a pre-existing condition? Need mental health treatment? As Los Angeles Times Columnist Michael Hiltzik recently reported, short-term health plans might not have you and your loved ones covered. Yet in their latest attempt to sabotage the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Trump…
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Ongoing Advocacy Needed to Ensure Children Covered by Managed Care Plans Receive Medicaid’s Guaranteed Pediatric Benefit
Child health advocates know the importance of five simple but powerful letters in Medicaid: EPSDT or Early and Periodic Screening Diagnostic and Treatment Services. EPSDT – that is, Medicaid’s comprehensive pediatric benefit standard – provides children with preventive and diagnostic services and ALL medically necessary services that can be covered under federal Medicaid law to…
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Medicaid is a Lifeline for Arizona Families Like the Carriggs
Meet Melanie Carrigg, who was adopted as a baby, was born with Down syndrome and is deaf. Medicaid covers a lot of her medical needs not covered by her families’ insurance, TRICARE, which is offered to military families like hers. Melanie’s mother, Austin, explains that without Medicaid, her family would face unmanageable medical expenses or…
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Puerto Rico’s Oversight Board Certifies Fiscal Plan: What are the Implications for Medicaid?
As I have previously written, a robust and resilient Medicaid program is essential to Puerto Rico’s long-run recovery from the devastation of Hurricanes Maria and Irma. Its residents disproportionately rely on Medicaid for their health coverage due to their low incomes and relative lack of access to private insurance. For example, 62 percent of children…
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Melanie’s Story: A New Sense of Normal
Previously, Austin shared the story of bringing baby girl Melanie into her family’s life, and how TRICARE and Medicaid helped cover her child’s complex medical needs. Today, this amazing mom shares more about Melanie’s medical journey, and how, inspired by their youngest, this family became health care policy advocates. This blog was originally published by…
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Melanie’s Story: Adopted by an Army Family Who Meets Her Complex Medical Needs
In honor of the “Month of the Military Child”, Speak Now for Kids published this story to help readers learn how military families like the Carriggs meet the health care needs of their children with complex medical conditions. This is the first blog post of a two part series by Austin Carrigg, the mother of three…
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How to Reduce Improper Payments in Medicaid
It turns out that government programs make mistakes. Who knew? If you’re the federal government, you try to identify the mistakes your programs are making and correct them. That’s exactly what the federal government does with its large domestic programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP. Each year, in each of these programs, it measures and…
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Medicaid Proves to be a Winning Topic in this Year’s Pulitzer Prize Contest
Stories about Medicaid earned top honors in this year’s Pulitzer Prize contest: editorial writer Andie Dominick from the Des Moines Register earned a top prize for her columns on the consequences of Iowa’s transition to Medicaid managed care, and health journalist Andy Marso won a finalist mention for his coverage of the lack of transparency in…
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President Trump’s Executive Order Focuses on Reducing Poverty but Many Administration Policies Run Counter to that Goal
The President issued an executive order yesterday titled “Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility”. It requires the Secretaries of Treasury, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, HHS, HUD, Transportation and Education to review all regulations and guidance to ensure they are in compliance with the executive order and submit a list of recommended regulatory…
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Mississippi’s Proposed Medicaid Work Rule Would Disproportionately Harm Mothers Living in Small Towns and Rural Areas of State
Mississippi’s request for a Medicaid work requirement has emerged as the one to watch. Its section 1115 waiver is now awaiting federal action and could well be the test of whether states that have never accepted the Medicaid expansion can impose this sort of requirement on their most vulnerable parents. CCF, working with the Mississippi…
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Research Update: The Young Child Undercount in the Census
It was announced last week that an immigration question was going to be added to the decennial census for the first time since 1960, leading to concerns of an undercount among immigrant and minority groups. Researchers are tracking hard-to-count communities from the last census (here is a map and explainer). The map considers a census…
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Trump Administration Medicaid Drug Rebate Proposal Raises Serious Concerns for Beneficiaries, Unlikely to Reduce Costs
As part of its fiscal year 2019 budget, the Trump Administration included a proposal to provide legislative authority for a new demonstration project for up to five states to opt out of the Medicaid drug rebate program, negotiate their own rebates from drug manufacturers and impose “closed” drug formularies for beneficiaries. Such a proposal raises…
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“Rolling Back” the Medicaid Access Rule: Don’t Ask, Don’t Know
Last November, the CMS Administrator, Seema Verma, promised the National Association of Medicaid Directors she would “rollback” her agency’s regulations on access to care and managed care. It was clear she didn’t like the regulations—she called them “burdensome,” a concern she does not have when it comes to beneficiaries who will be overwhelmed by work…
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New Study Shows Benefits of Identifying and Enrolling Uninsured Young Children into Public Health Insurance Through School-Based Outreach
Despite gains in expanding health coverage to children over the past decade, we still have about 3.3. million uninsured children nationwide. And most of them, growing up in low-income and working-poor families, qualify for public insurance programs such as Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). So, what can we do about this? Schools…
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VIDEO: Charlie and Rebecca Wood Share Their Story on Why Medicaid Matters So Much to Medically Fragile Children
I met Charlie and Rebecca Wood of Virginia recently. We were able to help them create a short video to explain how important Medicaid is to Charlie and her family. I wrote about some amazing families like the Woods last summer and our colleague Marta Conner wrote about her daughter and the importance of Medicaid to her family as well. …
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Kaiser Health Tracking Poll Finds 74% View Medicaid Favorably
The latest Kaiser health tracking poll found that roughly three-quarters of the public hold favorable views of Medicaid. The results do not vary drastically by political party. The poll also found that seven in ten Americans say they have ever had a connection to Medicaid, either through their own coverage, their child’s coverage, or indirectly…
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Kaiser 50-State Survey on Medicaid/CHIP Eligibility, Enrollment, Renewal and Cost-Sharing Policies Released
The Kaiser Family Foundation teamed up with Georgetown University Center for Children and Families researchers for the eighth year to conduct the annual 50-State Survey on Medicaid and CHIP. This 16th annual report reflects eligibility, enrollment, renewal, and cost-sharing policies in place as of January 2018. This year’s report takes stock of how the programs have…
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Alabama Mothers and Children Will Bear the Brunt of Proposed Medicaid Restrictions
As regular readers of SayAhhh! know, on January 11th CMS released guidance announcing its interest in approving state proposals to impose work requirements on Medicaid beneficiaries. Since then CMS has approved three waivers to do so (along with other important and harmful changes such as lockouts which we are not talking about today) – Kentucky,…
