Blog
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How Can States Better Protect Consumers from Unexpected Health Care Charges?
Even when consumers do their best to obtain services from providers in their health plan’s network, they may still face unexpected charges. Unexpected bills may show up when a consumer goes to a network hospital for emergency care, but is treated by a physician or other health professional who is not in the health plan’s…
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Florida House Votes Down Senate Medicaid Plan Leaving Florida with Large Coverage Gap
Today the Florida House voted down the Senate’s Florida Health Insurance Affordability Exchange plan that would have accepted federal Medicaid funds. The House’s rejection of the Senate plan follows a strong bipartisan vote in that chamber in favor earlier this week of 33-3. Both chambers have large Republican majorities. An estimated 669,000 Floridians will remain…
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Advocates Join Mayor O’Neal’s Walk to Focus on Need to Expand Medicaid and Save Rural Hospitals
Starting this week, Mayor Adam O’Neal of Belhaven began leading his second 283 mile walk from his small town in North Carolina to Washington DC. This year, several state health care advocates we know and admire including Laura Guerra-Cardus of the Children’s Defense Fund Texas, five other Texans and repeat walkers Adam Linker and Nicole…
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Medicaid: A Sound Investment for Kids, Their Families and Their Futures
While our attention has been necessarily focused on extending CHIP funding (and working on the best ways to take advantage of the funding boost that came with it), Congress is engaged in another exercise that demands the attention of children’s health advocates. As in recent years, Medicaid is on the chopping block during budget negotiations,…
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Broad Wisconsin Budget Coalition Backs BadgerCare Expansion
By Jon Peacock, Wisconsin Coalition on Children and Families Sooner or later, Wisconsin is going to expand its Medicaid coverage, known as “BadgerCare,” to include all adults up to 138% of the federal poverty level (FPL). The strong public support for expanding coverage and the substantial financial benefits of accepting increased federal funding will eventually…
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Sustained Outreach is a Key to Success in Connecting Uninsured Kids to Coverage
Medicaid and CHIP have been instrumental in driving the uninsured rate for children to all time low. In recent years, however, this progress has stalled nationally and even reversed in some states. It’s no secret that sustained outreach is key to success in connecting uninsured kids to coverage. So we were particularly pleased that Congress…
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Florida’s LIP Medicaid Waiver Amendment Now Open for Public Comment – National Implications
It’s hard to miss the ongoing debate about Florida’s Medicaid expansion and the related subject of how the federal government plans to respond to the state’s request for continued funding of its Low Income Pool. But it would be easy to miss that the federal government just opened that amendment up for public comment. As…
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What, Exactly, is in that CHIP Extension?
It’s hard to believe it was just last month when Congress passed and President Obama signed the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) of 2015, which extended CHIP funding for two additional years with no major structural or program changes. It funds the ACA’s 23%-point bump, extends CHIPRA’s child health quality provisions and outreach/enrollment…
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Medicaid Managed Care Regs Released – Let the Reading Begin
While we all breathed a collective sigh of relief when CMS did not release the Medicaid and CHIP Managed Care proposed rules prior to the Memorial Day weekend, we have our work cut out for us the next few weeks (months) as CMS released 653 pages of proposed rules late yesterday. Organizations have until July 27th…
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Obama Administration Announces Cuts to Florida’s Special LIP Dollars
In the latest development in Florida’s Medicaid saga, yesterday CMS gave a preliminary response to Florida’s Low Income Pool request. Adhering to the principles outlined in an April 14 letter, CMS indicated that it plans to cut LIP substantially by 55% for the state’s next fiscal year and 75% in the following year – the…
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Celebrate or Condemn Enrollment Success? Affordable Care Act Critics Can’t Decide
Health care policy debates can often be confusing but the rapidly shifting positions in the latest tempest on Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act are harder to follow than a ping-pong ball. For background one has to travel back to 2013 as major glitches in the healthcare.gov website were adversely affecting initial enrollment in the…
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New Study Confirms Importance of Medicaid/CHIP Maintenance of Effort
During the debate on CHIP, conversations focused a lot on what would happen to kids’ coverage without the program. Now that Congress has extended CHIP funding through 2017, we look to the future. In the near-term, if no new funds are available after 2017, states may eliminate their separate CHIP programs. Further, many Say Ahhh!…
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State-Based Marketplaces Looking for Financing Stability in Shifting Landscape
By Sean Miskell Over the last few months, state-based health insurance marketplaces have navigated a largely successful second open enrollment period and a mostly uneventful first tax season for marketplace consumers. Yet state-based marketplaces continue to face important decisions, such as determining the size of their operating budgets and how to finance them. Because marketplaces…
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GAO Report: Small Share of Medicaid Beneficiaries Account for Large Share of Cost
According to a study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) – a congressional watchdog tasked with reporting on government programs for Congress – a small subset of Medicaid beneficiaries account for a disproportionately large share of Medicaid expenditures. Medicaid covers the very vulnerable populations of low-income people – many with disabilities – with high health…
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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…