Blog
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Kelly Whitener to Join Georgetown University CCF Staff in July
There are lots of exciting things happening at the Center for Children and Families (CCF) these days including the upcoming celebration of our 10th anniversary at our annual conference this July. As we celebrate a decade of work, it gives me great pleasure to announce that as of July 1st, Kelly Whitener, who currently serves…
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States Need to Select Essential Health Benefit Benchmark Plans for 2017 Soon!
Did you know states need to select their Essential Health Benefits (EHB) benchmark plan for 2017 in just a few weeks? If not, you could be forgiven for missing this one. There’s plenty going on to capture your attention – the wait for the Supreme Court to weigh in on premium tax credits in federally…
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For Mother’s Day: Expand Medicaid and Women’s Access to Health Coverage
By Jesse Cross-Call, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities Health insurance for women improves both their own health and that of their children, research shows. Yet, low-income women living in the 21 states that have not expanded Medicaid as part of health reform face glaring gaps in access to health coverage.In these states, 1.8 million uninsured…
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The ACA’s State Innovation Waivers: A Need for Transparency and a Role for Stakeholders
By Joan Alker and Sabrina Corlette Discussion of new “superwaiver” authority is a hot topic in many state and health policy circles. Recently at a conference of state health officials sponsored by the National Governors Association, several states mentioned their interest in the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) so-called Section 1332 waivers. This provision of the…
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Medicaid/CHIP Participation Rate Was 88.3 percent Among Children in 2013
By Genevieve M. Kenney and Nathaniel Anderson, Urban Institute We keep a close eye on fluctuations in the participation rate in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) because it is so critical to efforts to bring down the uninsured rate for children. Our latest data found that children’s participation in Medicaid/CHIP was 88.3…
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Center for Children and Families is 10 Years Old This Week!
My how time flies when you’re having fun and doing what you love. Ten years ago we launched the Center for Children and Families within Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute. Thank you to all of our funders, state partners, national partners and dedicated staff for helping us reach this milestone. Working together we have helped…
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Florida’s Medicaid Budget: Just the Facts
In Florida, as in other states, there is a great deal of misinformation about how much the state pays for Medicaid. The program is jointly administered by both states and the federal government, and the feds pay for a majority of Medicaid’s costs in all states. However, some of Medicaid’s opponents obscure the federal government’s…
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New and Improved! A Special Enrollment Period for Some Caught in Medicaid Coverage Gap
As part of our Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded Navigator Technical Assistance project, we’ve helped Navigators and assisters answer tough questions from consumers. Many questions focused on special enrollment periods (SEPs), including a new “tax season” SEP that applied to individuals who learned about the requirement to have coverage only when they found out they were…
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Of Course Medicaid Health Coverage Improves Patient Health
There’s an old public policy joke pointing out how sometimes issues that really aren’t debatable are portrayed as such in a media that strives to be evenhanded. It starts with a particularly dogmatic legislator declaring in committee that “the earth is flat” and who is then obviously contradicted by his peers. The headline on the story about the committee…
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More Eligible but Unenrolled Kids are Being Connected to Medicaid & CHIP Coverage
CMS just released 2013 participation rates for children in Medicaid and CHIP, as calculated by experts at the Urban Institute. We keep a close eye on this data as it provides important insights into how well states are reaching eligible but uninsured children (which are the majority of uninsured children). As Say Ahhh! readers well…
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The Bump in Federal CHIP Funding: A Chance to Invest Freed-Up State Funds in Kids
[Editor’s note: The joy of CHIP funding extension has CCFers breaking into song. We had a difficult time not headlining this post “All About that Bump,” to be sung “It’s all about that bump, ‘bout that bump, more funding” to this popular tune.] As the ink was drying on H.R. 2 (now Public Law 114-10),…
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Healthcare.gov Fixes System Glitch in Counting Social Security Income for Certain Tax Dependents
Earlier this week, Health Affairs ran a lengthy blog I wrote about how Healthcare.gov incorrectly counts Social Security income for tax dependents who are not required to file taxes. Policy experts and enrollment assisters had suspected the system glitch existed for some time before CMS confirmed the error in early March. Thankfully, the problem is…
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Permanent 90% Federal Funding for IT Systems Is a Must For States to Achieve Medicaid Modernization
Medicaid modernization is a popular term used by states to describe how they are moving into the digital age to streamline eligibility and enrollment and improve operational efficiency. Technology is at the center of this transformation but the fact that many states have held on to 30-year old mainframe systems suggests that states won’t keep…
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Study: Medicaid Benefits are Well-Worth its Costs
By Sophia Duong A new study published in the American Journal of Public Health, “Considering Whether Medicaid is Worth the Cost: Revisiting the Oregon Health Study,” finds that Medicaid is in fact a cost-effective program. The finding comes from researchers at Columbia University and New York University who analyzed data from the Oregon Health Study…
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Rules Propose Permanent 90% Federal Match for Medicaid Eligibility Systems: Tell HHS You Like It!
A year or so ago in a room of Ohio legislative staffers, I asked everyone under 30 to raise their hands. It was about 90% of the audience. I then said, “Your state’s Medicaid eligibility system is older than you.” And it was true, not only for Ohio, but also for many states across the…
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“Impossible to Argue Against” – The Significant Change in State Debates over Accepting Medicaid Funding
Last week I noted how two very unusual editorials at major newspapers in Tennessee and Florida indicated what I called a “debate turning point” on the Medicaid expansion funding issue. Since then there is more evidence of this turning point in both of these states – which haven’t yet accepted the federal money for expanded…
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Vikki Wachino Appointed to Officially Replace Cindy Mann at CMS
I am so happy to see that Vikki Wachino has accepted the position of Director for the Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services (CMCS) at CMS. Vikki stepped into the role of Acting Director when Cindy Mann left the agency in January. Children’s health advocates will recall Vikki’s tenure as Director of the Children and…
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Armstrong v. Exceptional Child—The Supreme Court’s “Fairest Reading” Really Isn’t Fair
By Jane Perkins, Legal Director of National Health Law Program In 2009, the Exceptional Child Center and other providers of in-home supportive services for people with disabilities sued the Idaho Medicaid Director, Richard Armstrong, on the grounds that they were not being paid enough. According to the record in the case, the state set the providers’ rates…
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Navigator Grants for OE3 Announced
Today, CMS released the funding opportunity announcement (FOA) for a new round of navigator grants. As noted in my blog earlier this week, these grants will be awarded for a period of three years unlike annual awards in the prior two grant rounds. A total of $67 million will be awarded in the first year,…
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Time to Raise a Glass: CHIP Funding Extension Headed to President’s Desk!
Late this evening, the Senate passed H.R.2, the compromise SGR-CHIP package passed by the House late last month, by an overwhelmingly strong vote (92-8). Most of the health policy world will be buzzing about the fact that this historic bipartisan achievement makes the SGR “doc fix” permanent, and that’s indeed a grand feat. But this…