Say Ahhh!
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Top 10 Rural Counties With Largest Share of Kids and Adults Relying on Medicaid to Meet Health Needs
Using data from our Rural Health Policy Project, we just took a look at the counties across the country that have the highest percent of children and adults relying on Medicaid for their health care. As readers of SayAhhh! know, our study found that children living in small towns and rural areas are significantly more…
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Research Shows Medicaid Expansion Improves Access to Health Care, Helps Families Achieve Economic Security
While opponents of Medicaid and its expansion under the ACA continue to claim that the value and quality of care provided by Medicaid is lacking, research offers evidence that Medicaid coverage is largely comparable to private coverage (check out our factsheet for more information). According to a new study by the Commonwealth Fund, when compared…
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Top Five Threats to Child Welfare from the Senate Health Care Repeal Proposal
The Senate’s proposal to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and to sharply cut Medicaid payments to states through so-called per capita caps can sound very abstract to social workers and policymakers coping with the day-to-day tragedies and crises of child welfare. But these disastrous changes could take a major step toward becoming law after…
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Medicaid Cap: A Bad Deal that Gets Worse Over Time
As we’ve explained, the Senate Leadership bill to “repeal and replace” the ACA includes a cap on federal Medicaid payments to states with two budget dials: a limit on annual growth and a separate reduction for states that spend more on their Medicaid beneficiaries. These dials are designed to lower federal spending, and it turns…
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Senate Repeal Bill More Than Doubles Number of Uninsured Kids
The “Better Care Reconciliation Act” a.k.a. the Senate’s proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act and cut Medicaid would result in a sharp U-turn in the nation’s historic progress on children’s health coverage. Our nation recently brought the uninsured rate for children down to a record low of less than 5%. A new…
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Fitch Report: Proposed Medicaid Cuts Could Impact States’ Credit Ratings
Medicaid is more than simply the nation’s largest health insurer for children. It’s also the largest source of federal funds to states. The Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA) bill that stalled in the Senate earlier this week would cut federal payments to states by $772 billion over the next 10 years and establish a platform for the…
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Medicaid is Vital to Seniors in Small Towns and Rural Areas
Most of our research is focused on children and families, but as we looked at Medicaid use in small towns and rural areas for our recent report, we were curious what the data showed for seniors. After all, grandparents and older relatives are an important part of most families, and their health and wellbeing is…
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Congressional Budget Office says Senate Bill Would Kick 22 Million People Off of Health Coverage
As readers of SayAhhh! already know, the Senate released a discussion draft of their ACA repeal and replace bill last week and updated it today. We’ve already blogged about the implications we see of the Senate draft – like how it is not nice to children and families, how even Jimmy Kimmel says Medicaid caps…
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Proposed Health Bill Would Increase Consumer Debt and Drive Up Uncompensated Care
The Senate health bill ends retroactive eligibility, hospital presumptive eligibility, and any presumptive eligibility determination for expansion adults, which includes many parents. The end of retroactive eligibility and hospital presumptive eligibility will drive up consumer medical debt, which was the largest cause of U.S. bankruptcies prior to the Affordable Care Act. It will also drive…
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Doubling Down on Dialing Down on Children
Last Thursday, the Senate Leadership released a draft bill to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. The draft is even worse for the 37 million children that Medicaid covers and the providers who serve them than the bill that narrowly passed the House. Not only would the draft dial down the federal payments to…
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Policymakers, Health Groups, and Jimmy Kimmel Say Medicaid Caps Won’t Work
Over the last week, many health care providers and policy makers have weighed in on the latest health care reform efforts in the Senate. All point to proposed Medicaid caps, which go well beyond the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and undermine well-established paths to coverage for children and families that were in place well before the…
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Reviewing the Evidence on the Value of Health Insurance
Some of our favorite health researchers—Ben Sommers, Atul Gawande, and Katherine Baicker–published an article this week in the New England Journal of Medicine sharing the most recent evidence on the effects of health insurance coverage, especially Medicaid coverage, to inform the national debate on health care. They review the most rigorous studies on how health…
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Senate Bill is Not Nice to Children and Families
There is a tremendous amount to digest here, and we are still working through the complex text, but one thing is clear – the Senate bill (like the House bill) will start moving the country backwards with respect to child and family coverage. Readers of Say Ahhh! know that the number of uninsured children is…
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The Medicaid Cap: “Carving Out” Medically Complex Kids Won’t Protect Them
The Senate Leadership is reportedly including a cap on federal Medicaid payments to states in its version of legislation to “repeal and replace” the ACA. That cap will apparently look a lot like the cap that narrowly passed the House in early May, but with some tweaks to accommodate concerns of individual Senators. One tweak…
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Candace Webb Joins Center for Children and Families Team
We are pleased to announce that Candace Webb has joined the staff at Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families as a senior state health policy analyst. Candace comes to Georgetown University with a decade of experience in public health, most recently as the Western Services Branch Chief in the Division of State HIV/AIDS Programs…
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The AHCA Will Kill Jobs and Chill Economic Growth
The ongoing political debate over repealing the Affordable Care Act keeps me scratching my head on many fronts, one of which is the overwhelming body of evidence that the proposed replacement will cause real people to lose real jobs. The latest report on to catch my attention was an economic and employment analysis by the Commonwealth…
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States at Risk = Children and Families at Risk
It is a truth universally acknowledged that states don’t get sick, people get sick. But in a program like Medicaid, where the federal government and the states share in the cost of medical and long-term care services that people need, the fiscal fortunes of states and the health of beneficiaries are inextricably linked. If the…
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New Analysis Finds Uninsured Rate for Kids Would Increase by 50% Under AHCA
If the Affordable Health Care Act (AHCA) becomes law, the uninsured rate for children would increase by a whopping 50% by 2026 according to a new analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The Center’s report is based on a deeper dive into the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the AHCA that was passed by…
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CMS Does Not Appear to Be Honoring Public Comment Requirement on Indiana Medicaid Waiver Request
My top-notch intern is checking the CMS website every day, and it looks like Friday June 9th, after regular business hours, federal CMS did two things with respect to Indiana’s desire to impose a work requirement on certain Medicaid beneficiaries and make other changes to their Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP) 2.0 program. First, CMS certified the application…
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The Risk of Letting Politicians, Not Pediatricians, Determine Children’s Health Care
Fifty years ago, after learning that half the young men drafted for the Vietnam War failed baseline health exams, the federal government instituted Medicaid’s comprehensive, pediatrician-recommended benefit standard for children known as Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnostic, and Treatment (EPSDT). The federal benefit standard in Medicaid ensures that low-income and vulnerable children receive the health care services…
