Say Ahhh!
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NEACH Summit Highlights Continuous Battle for Health Care Access and Coverage for Children
By Ben Koller, Community Catalyst Last month, children’s health advocates and experts from around New England gathered for the New England Alliance for Children’s Health’s (NEACH) annual Children’s Health Care Summit. NEACH, an initiative of Community Catalyst, is a broad-based coalition of health advocates, providers, and legal experts dedicated to improving children’s access to high-quality,…
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Permanent 90/10 Rule Will Help States Continue Efforts to Modernize IT Systems
Although final publication of the 90/10 rule – providing generous, enhanced federal funding for Medicaid eligibility and enrollment systems – doesn’t quite bring the surprise of opening an unexpected holiday gift, it is still gives us many reasons to celebrate. If CMS had allowed the enhanced funding to expire as initially planned, states would have…
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Premium Assistance and Wrapped Benefits Part 2: A Startling Discovery
As I blogged about last week, our recent report with co-authors at the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured looked at wrapped benefits and how they are working in selected Section 1906 premium assistance programs. The most startling discovery to me was the finding that families have no cost-sharing protections in the programs we…
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South Dakota Governor on Medicaid Expansion – “Promising,” but “not a done deal”
Governor Dennis Daugaard lays out the case for Medicaid expansion in his FY17 Budget Address on December 8, 2015. While saying the discussions around expansion in his state are “promising,” Daugaard cautions that it is “not a done deal” and still requires both Native American tribal approval as well as approval by the South Dakota…
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New Research: Public Coverage Working Better for Children than Private
A timely new study published in JAMA Pediatrics compares how effective coverage under arrangements in Medicaid, CHIP, and private coverage are in meeting children’s health needs. With our recent report out on children’s uninsurance rates in the nation and all 50 states, this data provides insight into access, quality, and cost of health care services…
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Senate reconciliation bill repeals key children’s health provisions
So despite a bipartisan CHIP extension earlier this year, it appears that children’s coverage is not as popular as we may have thought. In fact, if the reconciliation bill as passed becomes law there is a good reason to believe that millions of children would become uninsured; almost assuredly the historic and steady reductions in the…
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Senate Bill Would Result in Coverage Loss for Six Million Newly Medicaid Insured Adults and Children’s Uninsured Rate will Increase Sharply, Reversing Historic and Bipartisan Gains
The United States Senate just passed a bill that would effectively repeal multiple provisions of the Affordable Care Act and result in at least 22 million Americans becoming uninsured. The Congressional Budget Office warned in its analysis of the legislation that major health insurance market disruption would be very likely, noting that: “[R]epealing the subsidies…
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Premium Assistance and Wrapped Benefits: Do They Work?
Author’s note: This is the first in a two (or possibly three) part blog series – the next installment will ponder this question with a particular eye to the future of children’s coverage… Along with co-authors MaryBeth Musumeci and Robin Rudowitz at the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, Sean Miskell and I undertook…
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Arkansas and Arizona Drive in Different Directions on Medicaid Transportation Benefit
By Sean Miskell Most observers expect that remaining states that have not yet expanded Medicaid are likely to seek changes to the program via waivers as they move forward on expansion. A few states that have already expanded Medicaid are also seeking to make changes through waivers. But these changes are not always for the…
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No QHPs Comparable to CHIP, Says (Delayed) HHS Certification
Like many others that watch child health policy closely, we have been anxiously awaiting release of the months-overdue Congressionally-mandated study comparing CHIP with coverage children receive through qualified health plans (QHPs) in the marketplaces. Released just before Thanksgiving, the HHS certification summary reinforces what growing evidence has indicated: No QHPs were found comparable to CHIP. Not…
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Children’s Health Coverage: On the road to 100 percent?
by Ben Kerman, Atlantic Philanthropies The 2015 open enrollment period offers an opportunity to build on tremendous progress in bringing health coverage to more children and their families. An analysis of recent census data by Georgetown Center on Children and Families confirms that many states are making headway. Twenty five states achieved statistically significant decreases…
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A Tune-Up on Eligibility Rules and Application Process for Families with Immigrants
With the third open enrollment period firmly underway, assisters are racing to get eligible people covered, including many families with one or more immigrant member whom are often among the most complicated cases assisters see. Since nearly half of all uninsured children in America live in families with at least one immigrant member, enrolling families with…
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Comments Submitted On Texas Medicaid Waiver
Georgetown CCF, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and seven other national organizations submitted a letter to CMS for public comment on Texas’ proposal to extend its Section 1115 Medicaid demonstration project, the Texas Healthcare Transformation and Quality Improvement Program. The full comments that were submitted November 16, 2015 can be found here –…
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CMS Proposes Expanded Role for Navigators
The federal agency responsible for administering the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplaces, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), has released new proposed rules to govern health insurance companies and the marketplaces beginning in 2017. The rules cover a wide range of subjects, from the regulation of premium rates, to benefit design and…
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States Enact Policies to Help Protect Consumers from High Prescription Drug Costs
High prices for prescription drugs have been in the news lately. There is the eye-popping price of the life-saving hepatitis C drug Sovaldi ($1,000 a pill) and the announcement that Turing Pharmaceuticals would increase the price of Daraprim, a drug to treat a rare but serious infection, by 5,000 percent. At the same time, insurance companies are shifting…
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Shop to Renew Health Coverage During Open Enrollment
By Sandy Ahn, Center on Health Insurance Reforms Similar to last year’s open enrollment, the federally facilitated marketplace (FFM) will automatically renew consumers into coverage if they do not go back to the marketplace to update their information and select a plan. This means that eligible consumers will be automatically re-enrolled into coverage and receive…
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$32 Million Now Available to Help Reach Eligible but Unenrolled Kids
Most uninsured children are eligible for Medicaid or CHIP but are not yet enrolled so finding them and helping them enroll is critical to successfully reducing the uninsured rate for children. As my colleague Tricia Brooks has pointed out many times, it is no secret that sustained outreach and enrollment support is the key to…
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Medicaid Expansion Would Help More Latino Families Succeed
By Steven Lopez, National Council of La Raza Latinos are the most uninsured population in the country. As the largest civil rights and advocacy organization in the nation, the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) works to improve the lives of Hispanic Americans, no matter who they are, where they live, or how much they…
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Unpacking the Uninsured Kids Report: Breaking Down Data by Race
Since 2008, the number of uninsured kids has declined by 2.5 million children nationwide. Following the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, 94 percent of all children have health insurance coverage. Still, there are 4.4 million children living in the United States without health coverage. Our report released last week, Children’s Health Insurance Rates in 2014:…
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More Evidence that Medicaid Expansion Helps State Budgets
Recently, Kaiser Family Foundation released a report on Medicaid Enrollment & Spending Growth for FY 2015 and 2016. There is a lot of interesting data in the report, but the stand out finding confirms what we already know: Medicaid expansion is good for state budgets and leads to increases in coverage. Medicaid Enrollment is up…