Media Coverage
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Drug Manufacturers May Catch A Break On Medicaid Rebates For Opioid Treatment
Pink Pharma By: Sarah Karlin-Smith CMS believes a new law set to take effect this fall will prohibit Medicaid from collecting rebates on opioid use disorder treatments, Congressional offices and Medicaid stakeholders tell the Pink Sheet. Experts worry this interpretation could open the door for CMS to rule other drugs don’t qualify for rebates. ……
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Covid-19 Vaccination Costs to Strain State Medicaid Programs
Bloomberg Law Getting millions of Covid-19 vaccine doses to the poorest adults in the country will require budget-conscious Medicaid plans to get creative with dwindling resources and a patchy health-care system not designed for mass inoculation. … But analysts say that increase probably won’t be enough for Medicaid plans to cover a new swath of…
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Pharmacists Can Give Routine Vaccinations to Children, HHS Says
Medpage Today A Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) decision allowing pharmacists to administer routine vaccinations to children during the COVID-19 pandemic is drawing mixed reviews from healthcare organizations. … Tricia Brooks, MBA, research professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families in Washington, D.C., agreed with the AAP and AAFP. “This rule…
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New Trump unemployment plan could squeeze state budgets, Medicaid rates
Modern Healthcare By: Rachel Cohrs If President Donald Trump’s plan to extend additional unemployment benefits further squeezes state budgets already ravaged by COVID-19, states could look to Medicaid as a way to cut costs. … If states have to come up with the funds somehow and don’t get additional assistance from Congress, the unemployment program…
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Over 200,000 Missourians will get covered with Medicaid expansion
American Medical Association An estimated 230,000 state residents—about 40% of those now uninsured in Missouri—will become eligible for Medicaid when enrollment begins next year. Missouri had an uninsured rate of 9.4% in 2018, which tied it with Utah for the 17th-highest rate in the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. … Medicaid rolls are…
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Major U.S. Health Insurers Report Big Profits, Benefiting From the Pandemic
New York Times By: Reed Abelson The nation’s leading health insurers are experiencing an embarrassment of profits. Some of the largest companies, including Anthem, Humana and UnitedHealth Group, are reporting second-quarter earnings that are double what they were a year ago. And while insurance profits are capped under the Affordable Care Act, with the requirement…
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Missouri Voters Latest To Approve Medicaid Expansion
Politico By: Rachel Roubein Missouri voters on Tuesday approved Medicaid expansion to many of the state’s poorest adults, making their conservative state the second to join the Obamacare program through the ballot during the pandemic.The Missouri ballot measure expands Medicaid to about 230,000 low-income residents at a time when the state’s safety net health care…
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Millions Of Children Have Lost Their Health Insurance—What’s Our Plan?
Health Affairs By: Doug Strane The COVID-19 pandemic has constrained the economy in ways that would have been difficult to imagine only a few months ago. After years of economic expansion, unemployment reached 11.1 percent in June… Together these programs already insure nearly 40 percent of all children, and they will require both short-term buttressing…
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Childhood vaccinations beginning to rebound, but still below normal levels as school resumes
ABC News By: Olivia Rubin Childhood vaccination rates are still down in at least 20 states, public health officials in those areas told ABC News, a worrying trend that has continued in the days and weeks before children are set to head back to school in parts of the country. … Joan Alker, the executive…
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Parsing Medicaid Expansion in Missouri
Flatland By: Tammy Worth On Tuesday, voters in Missouri will decide if the state will become the 38th in the country to expand its Medicaid program. The expansion could cover more than 200,000 Missourians currently ineligible for the program, a majority of whom are working adults… Expansion states have seen a 50% reduction in infant…
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What Are Leaders Doing to Address Racial Health Disparities
Spectrum News By: Kevin Frey The coronavirus has only underlined the health disparities between Black and White Americans. African Americans have higher rates of diabetes, hypertension, and other ailments. They also are more likely to lack health insurance. So, what have leaders done to address these inequities – and what more could they be doing?……
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Question Of Medicaid Expansion Headed To Missouri Voters, Despite Republican Pushback
NPR By: Cara Anthony Haley Organ thought she had everything figured out. After graduating from a small private college just outside Boston, she earned her master’s degree, entered the workforce and eventually landed a corporate job here as a data analyst… Amid the pandemic, Medicaid already appears to be helping people newly out of work.…
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The COVID-19 Downturn Triggers Jump in Medicaid Enrollment
Kaiser Health News By: Phil Galewitz Reversing a three-year decline, the number of people covered by Medicaid nationwide rose markedly this spring as the impact of the recession caused by the outbreak of COVID-19 began to take hold…Joan Alker, executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., said…
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Covering Medicaid amid COVID-19: 6 things journalists should know
Journalist’s Resource By: Kerry Dooley Young Medicaid is a United States health insurance program run and funded by states with federal oversight and financial contributions. The total annual federal contributions vary by state, reflecting the differing levels of poverty and states’ decisions about whether to participate in the Medicaid expansion created by the Affordable Care…
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Medicaid is more important than ever for low-income families
The Salt Lake Tribune By: Sarah Leetham The Medicaid program will celebrate its 55th anniversary on July 30, the date that Congress authorized the Social Security Act in 1965… Individuals who have Medicaid coverage are also more likely than the uninsured to have a regular source of care and obtain their preventive care services during…
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Why Are Coronavirus Deaths Surging?
TIME By: William Barber II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove As the coronavirus surges across the U.S., states across the South and West have reported sharp increases in their daily number of new cases. Many of these same states refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, denying access to health care to hundreds of thousands…
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What It Took For This Coronavirus Patient’s $80,000 Air Ambulance Charge To Go Away
KCUR By: Celia Llopis-Jepsen A vicious bout of coronavirus hospitalized Anil Gharmalkar in April.The 41-year-old got severely ill, quickly. His besieged lungs fought for enough oxygen to survive. His local hospital in rural southeast Kansas put him on a ventilator and rushed him by helicopter to the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City,…
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Coronavirus has not hit Medicaid the way California feared
L.A. Times By: Rachel Bluth and Angela Hart The predictions were dire: Coronavirus lockdowns would put millions of Americans out of work, stripping them of their health insurance and pushing them into Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income people. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration projected that the pandemic would force about 2 million…
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Insurers worry drug companies could game changes to Medicaid rebate program in new rule
Fierce Healthcare By: Robert King Insurers are worried a raft of proposed changes to the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program could lead to drug manufacturers gaming the system to charge higher prices.… “The rule does not set a time limit on when manufacturers have to revise their best price reporting under a [value-based payment] arrangement—the current…
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Politicians Claim Cutting Medicaid Spending Will Ensure Funding for Schools. Our Analysis Shows the Opposite Will Happen
The 74 By: Edwin Park K-12 education and Medicaid are often cast as competing state budget priorities. Amid the calamitous loss of tax revenue in the coronavirus health and economic crisis, look for fiscal conservatives to cite their support for schools as they make arguments for cutting Medicaid spending. But a new analysis for the…