Research & Reports
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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…
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Implementing the Affordable Care Act for Millennials: What Can States Do?
By Maya Brod, Young Invincibles The Young Invincibles recently released a state guide with recommendations on how to best implement provisions of health care reform for young adults. The report, titled, “Implementing the Affordable Care Act for Young Invincibles: A State Guide for Health Care Reform for Millennials” identifies five major pieces of the ACA that disproportionately…
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NAIC Brings up Medical Loss Ratio Again
You know that expression, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”? Well, it came to mind this past week at the National Association of Insurance Commissioner’s (NAIC) fall meeting in Washington, DC. Just as in March, during the NAIC’s spring meeting in Austin, the NAIC consumer representatives were lulled into…
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The State of Young America: Health Care and Coverage
By Maya Brod, Young Invincibles Long-term economic trends, such as diminished wages and disappearing jobs, combined with rising health care costs, make our generation of young adults the most uninsured age group in the country. But in spite of these bleak trends, changes to the insurance system brought by health care reform have begun to…
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Foster Kids Rely on Medicaid
By Laura Boyd, Foster Family-based Treatment Association What is treatment or therapeutic foster care? Many in the child welfare ranks do not know; many are confused and unsure about TFC. Treatment or Therapeutic Foster Care (TFC) is specialized foster care consisting of intensive behavioral health services delivered usually in foster homes by licensed mental health…
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Childhood is an Extreme Sport – Get Kids Covered
I just returned from the Children’s Health Insurance Summit in Chicago where organizations that successfully applied for CHIPRA outreach and enrollment grants gathered to share ideas on how to better Connect Kids to Coverage. I’ll have more to say about the summit in a future blog but I first have to fulfill my promise to…
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A Chance to Raise Your Voice for Kids
By Joe Touschner We’ve posted in the past about the essential health benefits–the package of benefits that will be the basis for all health plans in the individual and small group markets and for some in Medicaid starting in 2014. Last month, the Institute of Medicine made recommendations to the Department of Health and Human…
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Can We Know the Unknown? How Medicaid Enrollment Could Vary Under Health Reform
By Martha Heberlein Back when the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was first being debated, there were two government estimates that predicted different numbers of new enrollees in Medicaid – one by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the other by the actuaries at CMS. Since then, a number of other studies have examined the impact…
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SC Medicaid Director Seeks to Remove Roadblocks to Medicaid Enrollment
Sue Berkowitz, South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center While South Carolina is often a state cited for being first on list for outcomes that are bad and last in those that are good, we have some surprisingly positive news. The South Carolina Medicaid director Tony Keck, in his 2012-13 budget request to Gov. Haley, asked…