Say Ahhh!
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Targeted Medicaid Enrollment Reaches More Kids
By Suzanne Wikle, CLASP The rate of children without health insurance has hit an all-time low of 6 percent, according to a new report from the Center for Children and Families. The drop is largely attributable to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and to states’ efforts to increase enrollment. States that have opted to expand Medicaid…
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Medicaid Expansion: Important Factor in Declining Uninsurance Rates for Children
Our report released last week (Children’s Health Insurance Rates in 2014: ACA Results in Significant Improvements) contained good news for people who share the belief that no child should ever be uninsured in our country – the national child uninsurance rate is now at a historic low of 6 percent. Kids haven’t quite caught up…
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Healthcare.Gov Promises a Snazzier Production for OE3
Yesterday marked the debut of the third open enrollment period for the Health Insurance Marketplaces, including Healthcare.gov, which is the storefront to the Marketplace in 37 states. Has the performance improved? What new bells and whistles will delight the audience? Faster lines at the box office. Although it looks the same to consumers, new account…
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Nondiscrimination and the Affordable Care Act
The Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services released a proposed rule on Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act on September 8, 2015. Section 1557 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin (including immigration status and English language proficiency), sex, age, or disability in any program…
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CMS Issues Long-Awaited Medicaid Access Regulation
Today CMS issued the long-awaited final rule on access to covered Medicaid services. The rule describes the requirements under section 1902(a)(30)(A) of the Social Security Act, known as the “access requirement.” The access requirement provides that states must have methods and procedures to assure that payments to providers are “sufficient to enlist enough providers so…
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Child Uninsured Rate Hits Historic Low – Thanks Goes Mainly to ACA, Medicaid & CHIP
Like many of you I was super excited to see the first round of data from the Census Bureau looking at health insurance rates in 2014 when it came out in late September. Needless to say, 2014 was a big year for health policy changes! Today we are releasing our annual report focused specifically on…
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Wondering What Marketplace Rate Increases Mean for Consumers?
Yesterday, CMS announced that premium costs for 2016 Silver benchmark plans (that’s the second lowest cost Silver plan) will increase by an average of 7.5% compared to 2015. However, there is significant variability in the differences ranging from an average 12.6% drop in premiums in Indiana (yes, that’s minus 12.6%) to an average increase of…
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Arkansas Health Care Reform Task Force Considers Changes to Medicaid Private Option
By Marquita Little, Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families Consultants for the Arkansas Health Care Reform Task Force released a new report recommending the Private Option become a transitional or temporary program focused on “moving people upward” to opportunities. This is on the heels of an earlier report noting the Private Option will save the…
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Half of the Uninsured are Eligible for ACA Coverage
by Jordan Messner, Graduate Research Intern The Kaiser Family Foundation published a report on October 13 examining the uninsured population in the United States and their options for coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The report found that although 32.3 million nonelderly people were uninsured at the beginning of 2015, 49% of these individuals (15.7…
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CMS Should Require More Transparency from Insurers
By Sean Miskell As the Affordable Care Act has been successful in its efforts to expand coverage to millions of Americans, the attention of policymakers, advocates, and families will increasingly turn to the value of this coverage and the nature of the choices available to those looking for insurance in the marketplace. The more data…
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North Carolina Infant Mortality Needs Bold Solutions, Not Business as Usual
by Rob Thompson, originally posted at NC Child The word “consistency” suggests stability, predictability, normalcy. It implies that we can move on and not worry. When the State of North Carolina announced our 2014 infant mortality data this week, the official release said “the 2014 statistics are consistent with previous years.” But for our state, consistency in the infant…
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Taking it to the streets: New ways to get uninsured kids enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP
by Sheila Hoag, Senior Researcher, and Debra Lipson, Senior Fellow, Mathematica Policy Research Traditionally, state and local Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) staff have conducted outreach to uninsured children eligible to help enroll them into these public coverage options. Advocates have also organized public education campaigns and enrollment events. Despite dramatic progress in…
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Cancer Patient: Medicaid Expansion Could Help Save Lives Like Mine in South Dakota
Ida Sievers of Renner, South Dakota, describes in this KELO TV (keloland.com) story how she avoided going to the doctor despite feeling awful for almost two years because she lacked health coverage—then when she finally went it turned out she had untreated leukemia. Dr. Rich Wender, the Chief Cancer Control Officer of the American Cancer…
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Complaints About Strong State Medicaid Enrollment Numbers Don’t Add Up
An occasional line among opponents of states using federal Medicaid dollars to close the health coverage gap is that some states have been too successful in enrolling people in this new health coverage option – the uninsured rate in expansion states is apparently falling too quickly to suit some people. I wrote about the puzzling inconsistencies…
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More People Have Health Coverage in Every State Thanks to ACA; Yet Some of the Poorest are Being Left Behind
by Suzanne Wikle, Projector Director, Advancing Strategies for Aligning Programs, CLASP When President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law, advocates hailed it as the most important health legislation since the creation of Medicaid and Medicare in 1965 — and one of the most important anti-poverty laws in decades as well. The monumental…
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Arkansas’s Health Care Reform Forum: Medicaid Expansion and the Private Option
How has the Affordable Care Act and health care reform directly affected consumers and access to health care? How does Medicaid expansion relate to the broader health reform effort? How has Arkansas’s Private Option affected the state’s health care system? What makes a premium assistance model appealing for health care Arkansas and other states? These…
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Medicare Part D After Ten Years: Lessons for the Affordable Care Act
The first ten years of Medicare Part D offers valuable insight into the future of the Affordable Care Act. In July 2013, a team of Georgetown researchers looked at Medicare Part D for some key lessons that the program offered to those implementing the Affordable Care Act. Part D started life during its implementation in…
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Many working parents in Georgia would benefit from closing health coverage gap
by Cindy Zeldin, Executive Director, Georgians for a Healthy Future It’s often assumed that if you have a job, you have health insurance. That’s not the case for many working families in Georgia, though, because our state leaders haven’t accepted the federal funding set aside for us to extend cost-effective Medicaid coverage to more uninsured…
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New Health Insurance Data Shows More Kentucky Kids are Covered
By Terry Brooks, Kentucky Youth Advocates New health insurance data recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau revealed that health insurance coverage rates for both children and adults increased in Kentucky from 2013 to 2014. The one-year estimates from the American Community Survey revealed that 95.7 percent of Kentucky children under 18 had health insurance in…
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Child and Parent Health Issues Can Lead to Chronic Absenteeism & Impact Student Success
Editor’s Note: Yesterday we published the first half of our interview with Hedy Chang of Attendance Works. She explained how child and parent health issues can become a barrier to school attendance and future success. Today we conclude the interview. Q: Many of the health barriers to attendance that your report mentions are preventable and/or treatable…