Research & Reports
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Medicaid and Medicare Turn 45 Today
Is this a scene from the latest Mad Men episode? While it’s from the same era, it’s fairly apparent from the attire that the photo was not taken on Madison Avenue. The photo was taken 45 years ago today at the signing ceremony of the Social Security Act of 1965, the law that created…
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$51 Million Available for Designing State Exchanges
By Martha Heberlein HHS announced today that up to $1 million per state will be available in grants to begin establishing health insurance exchanges. This first round of grants is designed to help cash-strapped states conduct the research and planning necessary to build the new marketplaces. Grant applications are available at: http://www.healthcare.gov/center/grants and are due…
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Consumer Assistance: A Guided Tour to Your New Health Care Choices
By Christine Barber, Community Catalyst We’ve all heard the recently-passed Affordable Care Act (ACA) provides a lot of new opportunities for improving health care coverage and access – but we also hear most Americans don’t understand what the law actually means for them. At Community Catalyst, we think a major opportunity created by national health…
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Bumps in the Road for Kids’ Coverage
By Sabrina Corlette, Georgetown Health Policy Institute In the last couple of weeks there have been reports that some insurance companies have decided they will no longer market “kids-only” policies, in response to the new requirement under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) that they issue coverage to all children, even those with pre-existing…
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Insurance Commissioners Meet on Exchanges: Medicaid and CHIP
Last week, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners held a first of many planned meetings on health care reform. In many ways, state insurance commissioners, have become the front lines of health reform implementation as they are responsible for ensuring that health plans are compliant with the insurance reforms in the Affordable Care Act and they…
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Wisconsin Shows How States Can Mitigate the Downside of New Puerto Rico Law
By Jon Peacock, Wisconsin Council on Children and Families It isn’t often that state policymakers have to make program changes and policy choices because of a law passed in another state or territory of the U.S. Thus, it came as a big surprise to learn that a law enacted in Puerto Rico forces states to…
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Advocates Can Guide and Support Efforts to Advance Children’s Coverage: Reports Show How
By Eugene Lewit and Liane Wong The David and Lucile Packard Foundation The percent of uninsured children has consistently declined, despite deterioration of coverage for adults and the economy. This is one of the significant but frequently overlooked good news stories of recent years. The gains in children’s coverage have been due in large part to…
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CCF Comments to NAIC on Exchange Coordination with Medicaid and CHIP
CCF Comments to NAIC on Exchange Coordination with Medicaid and CHIP
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States will Face Tough Choices Without Extended Medicaid Funding
By Joe Touschner As we’ve noted previously Congress has yet to reach agreement on extending the increased Medicaid funding it originally granted in the 2009 economic recovery legislation. The increased payments are scheduled to end in December 2010, but most state budgets are looking no better than they were a year and a half ago. …
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What will this cost us – continued…
By Martha Heberlein Since the last time we talked about state estimates of the cost of health reform, several more have put them out. A few, in particular, struck me – Maine, Maryland, and Wisconsin. Why, you might ask? Because these three states found that health reform would save them money. John Holahan of the Urban…
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HHS Rule on Preventive Services: Bright Futures For All Children
By Judith S. Palfrey, MD, FAAP President, American Academy of Pediatrics On Wednesday, I was honored to attend an event in DC unveiling the US Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Interim Final Rule on preventive services under health reform. To so many of us in the business of taking care of children, the…
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New Reg Aims to Make Preventive Health Services More Accessible, Affordable
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” It is not often that I find myself quoting Benjamin Franklin, but it seems particularly apropos this week with the release of the latest Affordable Care Act regulation. On Wednesday, the Obama administration issued new rules requiring that health plans provide a series of expert-recommended preventive…
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The Doctor Is In
Doctor Donald M. Berwick, a respected Harvard professor and pediatrician who has built a reputation for improving quality and reducing health care costs, was sworn in this week as administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The agency had been without a permanent administrator since 2006. Dr. Berwick was installed in the CMS…
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A Deeper Look at Individual Responsibility Requirement
By Jocelyn Guyer Community Catalyst and Georgetown’s CCF have just finished up a piece that explores in detail the way that the new individual responsibility requirement will work. With all of the controversy and rhetoric surrounding the requirement, it seemed a good time to take an objective, detailed look at how it will actually work. …
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The New Responsibility to Secure Coverage: Frequently Asked Questions
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) includes a much-discussed requirement that people secure health insurance coverage for themselves and their children. This “individual responsibility requirement” is an essential element of the new law, which will play a vital role in increasing the number of people with health insurance and make it possible to…
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CHIP Tips: New Federal Funding Available to Cover Immigrant Children and Women
The recently enacted CHIP reauthorization law includes a number of programmatic and financing changes that affect both Medicaid and CHIP. One of these changes is a new option, often referred to as “ICHIA,” that allows states to receive federal funds for providing Medicaid and CHIP coverage to lawfully residing immigrant children and pregnant women regardless…
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Improving Medicaid Screenings for Children: New HHS Inspector General Report Shines a Light on the Issue
In May, HHS’ Inspector General released a study that presented some pretty depressing news – almost three-quarters of children on Medicaid in nine states are not receiving all of the medical, vision and hearing examinations (the study did not look at dental) that federal law (through the Medicaid EPSDT benefit) requires. It has long been…
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CMS Issues Long-Awaited CHIPRA Guidance
Yesterday, CMS issued two additional guidance letters related to implementation of the Children’s Health Insurance Reauthorization Act (CHIPRA) of 2009. The first of these letters is on new federal support for covering for lawfully residing children and pregnant women who have been in the country less than five years. This long-awaited guidance explains that there…
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Congress Gives States Little to Celebrate at the Fiscal New Year
By Joe Touschner When I served as an aide in the Ohio Legislature, an annual tradition was the Rockin’ Fiscal New Year’s Eve Party, held on June 30th as a way for staffers to mark the end of the state’s fiscal year (and every other year, the end of a grueling budget process). With or…
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Web Portal to Be Launched This Week
” Beam me up Scotty!” – Captain Kirk Okay Trekkies, I realize Captain Kirk didn’t utter those exact words but it is the phrase that comes to mind whenever I hear the word “web portal“ bandied about. The new health care reform web portal (you’ll be able to find it at healthcare.gov), slated for launch on…