Blog
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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…
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School Attendance and Health Care: Why Chronic Absenteeism Isn’t Just About Truancy
Editor’s Note: This is part 1 of a two-part conversation with Attendance Works Director Hedy Chang. Chang spoke to us about the critical role health care can play in closing the attendance gap. Attendance Works is a national initiative aimed at advancing student success by removing barriers and encouraging children to attend school regularly. A report Attendance Works…
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Why ACA Marketplaces Should Report Comprehensive Enrollment Data
By Sean Miskell Data can play an important role in improving health care systems. The state-based marketplaces established under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are well positioned to advance policy decisions by disclosing detailed information about enrollment. Such information could improve oversight of the post-ACA insurance market, and help policymakers and others more easily identify…
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New Georgia Chartbook: Facts v. Presentation in Medicaid Expansion Debate
The Georgia Budget and Policy Institute and Georgians for a Healthy Future released a great “back to basics” chart book last week explaining Medicaid in Georgia and how to use federal Medicaid dollars to close Georgia’s health insurance coverage gap. It includes easily understandable charts like this: and this: Most of all,…
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Congratulations to Miriam Harmatz: CCF’s 2015 Bulldog of the Year
For the second year in a row, CCF awarded an outstanding state partner with the Bulldog of the Year award. The Bulldog of the Year award recognizes an individual who exemplifies the characteristics of the bulldog (Georgetown University’s mascot) through their dedication to children and families and determination in the face of adversity. We were thrilled to name Miriam…
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Children’s Uninsured Rate Drops Significantly Thanks to the Affordable Care Act
By now you have heard the news that from 2013 to 2014 the country saw the greatest single year decline in the number of uninsured Americans on record with the overall uninsured rate falling to 10.4%. For children, using the American Community Survey data that was just released, the decline was smaller, but only because…
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What to know about the Census Bureau’s new ACS and CPS data on health coverage
On September 16, 2015 the Census Bureau will release data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and American Community Survey (ACS), providing updated income, poverty, and health insurance coverage rates for 2014. These reports should give the best picture of the effects of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) major coverage expansions on the uninsured rate.…
