Research & Reports
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First Focus Calls for Greater Investment in Children
By Tara Mancini Over the past 35 years, our nation’s GDP has increased by 168 percent, yet those gains are mostly missing from the picture when viewing from the perspective of the Child and Youth Well-Being Index (CWI). Over that same time period, the quality of life for children has increased by just a little…
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Setting the Record Straight on Medicaid Spending
By Tara Mancini Last week, NASBO released their 2010 Report of State Expenditures and per usual, the top line message picked-up by most of the media was the large share of state expenditures used on Medicaid. However, there are always exceptions to the rule, and Kristen Stewart writing for a Salt Lake City Tribune Blog…
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HHS Suggests States Will Have Choices on Essential Health Benefits
By Joe Touschner For nearly a year now, we’ve been tracking the process of defining the essential health benefits. The EHB package will define the minimum set of benefits to be covered by insurance plans in the individual and small group markets as well as benchmark Medicaid plans and Basic Health Programs. On Friday afternoon,…
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Coming Soon to a State Near You? Wisconsin seeks to preview a slasher triple feature
By Jon Peacock, Wisconsin Council on Children and Families A drama has been slowly unfolding in Wisconsin relating to the shape of the state’s Medicaid program. If it were made into a movie, it would be a slasher film with an unwilling cast of nearly half of the 780,000 people enrolled in Wisconsin’s highly successful…
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Examining Medicaid Managed Long-Term Service and Support Programs: Key Issues To Consider
By Laura Summer, Georgetown University Health Policy Institute (Editor’s Note: Given the increasing interest in Medicaid managed care among states eager to achieve cost-savings, we asked our colleague Laura Summer to blog for us on her latest report on managed care. Her report focused on long-term care services but it provides some helpful insights into broader…
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Proposed Medicaid Premiums Challenge Coverage for Florida’s Children and Parents
Florida’s proposed changes to its Medicaid program include a requirement for nearly all Medicaid beneficiaries, including children, who are enrolled in managed-care plans to pay a $10 monthly premium as a condition for Medicaid eligibility. This could result in 800,000 Florida children and parents – the majority of them children in very-low-income families –leaving Florida…
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Looking Ahead to 2012, What Changes Are In Store for Florida’s Medicaid Program?
Medicaid is a critical part of Florida’s health care system. It covers 3.1 million people in the state, the majority of whom are children. In 2006, a five-year pilot program that replaced traditional Medicaid with an unusual managed-care model and other features that required a Section 1115 waiver from the federal government. In 2012, there…
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UPDATE: Arizona – A KidsCare Band-Aid
By Martha Heberlein We’ve written before about Arizona’s response to the recession–substantial budget cuts and the only enrollment freeze in the nation in its CHIP program, KidsCare. Instituted almost two years ago, there are now 129,000 kids on the waiting list for access to affordable health coverage. A new (but somewhat familiar) proposal has emerged to…
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States Still Recuperating, Outlook is Positive
By Tara Mancini The National Association of State Budget Officers just released their Fall 2011 Fiscal Survey of States. We have become accustomed to reading about Medicaid as one of the big-ticket items in state spending. While some detractors have reasoned that increased spending is emblematic of a broken program, NASBO gets it correct by…
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More Options for Eligibility Determination Potentially Crack the Seamless System
This week, CMS released a Q & A on State-Exchange Implementation with new information on several topics, which are described below. Of concern and worth highlighting is the disappointing departure from the proposed rules by now allowing states that choose not to implement a state-based exchange to retain control over Medicaid and CHIP eligibility. The Notice…
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Despite Economic Challenges, Progress Continues: Children’s Health Insurance Coverage in the United States from 2008-2010
In this paper, health insurance data from the Census Bureau’s annual “American Community Survey” was analyzed in order to get a more accurate depiction of children’s coverage. Even though the number of children living in poverty has increased almost 19 percent over a three-year period, the number of children without health insurance declined 14 percent–…
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A Compass for America’s Health Care Navigators
By Suzie Shupe, California Coverage & Health Initiatives The Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) health insurance exchange marketplaces offer the promise of connecting millions of uninsured Americans with the health coverage and care they need. And by strengthening Medicaid, millions more will be able to get care. It is an historic opportunity, but also an unprecedented…
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Health Insurance Premium Increases Outpace Wages
Employer-based health insurance costs have increased three times faster than wages since the beginning of the decade. About 62% of those under age 65 live in a state where average health insurance premiums exceed 20% of the median income. In 2010, the average total premium for a family of four was $13,871, an increase of…
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Fuzzy Math: Treasury Department says kids don’t count when determining whether family insurance is affordable?
By Kristen Golden Testa, The Children’s Partnership Since when is 14,000 no different than 5,000? When the U.S. Treasury Department estimates the affordability of a family’s health insurance. If it goes uncorrected, their fuzzy math may deny affordable health coverage to 270,000 Californians–122,000 of whom are children. While premiums continue to rise across the board,…
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Using Mobile Phones to Help Families Access Vital Medicaid Coverage
By Lisa Han, The Childrens Partnership Recent data shows that people of color and low-income populations are adopting mobile technology at a rapid pace and are increasingly using mobile tools to access the Internet. These tools enable new ways of interacting with the government and enrolling in public services. Instead of standing in line at…
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Texas Has Highest % of Uninsured Children in Nation – Let’s Change That
By Kelli King-Jackson, Texas Children’s Defense Fund “Now we see everything that’s going wrong with the world and those who lead it. We just feel like we don’t have the means to rise above and beat it. So we keep waiting – waiting on the world to change.” John Mayer – Waiting on the…
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Expanding Access to Care for Young Adults Through the Right Outreach and Enrollment Strategies
By Brian Burrell, Young Invincibles The Affordable Care Act (ACA) marked a historic expansion of access to health care for many people, and the federal and state exchanges will be a large part of that reform. Ideally, low- and middle-income consumers will buy insurance with subsidies through online health benefit exchanges, where they can compare…
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Talking Enrollment in the Windy City
By Jenny Sullivan, Enroll America My colleague Ani and I had the pleasure of attending the Second National Children’s Health Insurance Summit earlier this month in Chicago. The gathering, hosted by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), was the official kick-off for the second round of outreach and enrollment grants that CMS awarded to 39…
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Children’s Health is a National Priority
By Patrick McIntyre, United Way When it comes to the health of our nation, United Way cares about ensuring that everyone has health insurance, that folks eat well, and that Americans remain active and energized. Specifically for children, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program provide vital health care to children whose families don’t receive…
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Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Affordable Care Act Challenge
By Eva Marie Stahl, Community Catalyst The awaited day is here. The Supreme Court announced that it will hear the case against the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) individual responsibility requirement (and other related requests). For those immersed in football season, this is the Super Bowl of legal challenges. Game time. Be prepared, the oral arguments will…