North Carolina
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Medicaid’s Role in Small Towns and Rural Areas
Key Findings Background One-fifth of people in the United States live in areas that are classified as non-urban. Residents of rural areas and small towns face additional challenges accessing needed health services compared to residents of metro areas for a variety of reasons including acute provider shortages, limited connectivity, and long distances to travel to…
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Federal Funding Cuts to Medicaid May Trigger Automatic Loss of Health Coverage for Millions of Residents of Certain States
Despite virtually no discussion of Medicaid during the election, Medicaid is facing proposals for significant reductions in federal funding. My colleague Edwin Park has already detailed some of the discussion around these cuts – which are being considered in service of facilitating an extension of tax breaks, the majority of which would go to the…
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North Carolina Finds Innovative New Way to Provide Families with Needed Medical Debt Relief
As a nonprofit health attorney over a decade ago I worked in North Carolina on pushing hospital systems to eliminate the practice of suing lower income patients for medical debt and associated abuses like pursuing liens against the houses of poor families. A Pulitzer-prize nominated newspaper series detailed the situation at the time in North…
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CMS Releases Updated Medicaid & CHIP Telehealth Toolkit, Includes State Best Practices and Behavioral Health Strategies
This month, CMS released an updated State Medicaid and CHIP Telehealth Toolkit consolidating information from previous toolkits and providing additional guidance – as required by the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act – on issues from billing best practices to strategies for using telehealth in schools. In addition to FAQs on issues such as benefit flexibility, financing,…
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North Carolina and Hawaii Make 10: States Advancing Medicaid/CHIP Multi-Year Continuous Eligibility for Young Children
It’s hard to keep up with the rapid progress in the number of states seeking federal approval to adopt multi-year continuous coverage for children covered by Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Since we last took stock, North Carolina and Hawaii have proposed 1115 waivers to adopt continuous eligibility for children from birth…
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State Medicaid and CHIP Snapshots, 2023
The Georgetown University Center for Children and Families (CCF) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) created factsheets underscoring the importance of Medicaid in providing coverage for children in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Sources available here. Previous snapshots can be found here (2019), here (2018) and here (2017). Check out more interactive…
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Update: North Carolina Passed Medicaid Expansion – Here’s How Politicians Justified Change of Heart
In March this year, the North Carolina legislature passed Medicaid expansion with bipartisan support, becoming the first state to pass expansion legislatively since Virginia in 2018. In an interesting turn of events, many House and Senate Republicans in North Carolina, who for years staunchly opposed expanding Medicaid, changed their positions leading up to the bill’s…
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Why North Carolina is Finally Getting to ‘Yes’ on Medicaid Expansion
The ancient Roman historian Tacitus wrote that, “It is the singularly unfair peculiarity of war that the credit of success is claimed by all, while a disaster is attributed to one alone.” In the spirit of this observation from 97 AD, I’ll happily admit to trying for at least some historical involvement in North Carolina’s…
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North Carolina: A Bipartisan Effort to Expand Medicaid Coverage and Improve Access to Healthcare
Last month, my colleague Adam Searing wrote a blog post about the status of Medicaid expansion in five states (South Dakota, North Carolina, Wyoming, Missouri, and Mississippi) twelve years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act. This week, we’re taking a closer look at one of these states, North Carolina, which is on a…
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Low-Wage Uninsured Workers: State Profiles
The recently enacted American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARP) includes new large financial incentives for states to extend health insurance coverage to low-wage workers and other adults earning less than $17,775 a year. These incentives apply to regular spending in a state’s Medicaid program and offer a five-percentage point across the board increase in…
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Once Upon a Time in North Carolina: CHIP Health Services Initiative Funds Early Literacy Promotion as Part of Well-Child Care
by Emma Sandoe, Anna Miller-Fitzwater, Donna Cohen Ross Once Upon a Time So many well-loved stories of early childhood begin with the words “once upon a time” and go on to tell fairy tales of fantastic adventure. Here in North Carolina, we are excited to share our own early childhood story—one that is certainly adventurous and promises…
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New Data Finds Number of Uninsured Children Increasing at Alarming Rate
NC Child By: Fawn Pattison An estimated 142,000 North Carolina children were uninsured last year, a number that has increased about 23% since 2016, according to a new report released by the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families. About 27,000 more North Carolina children were uninsured in 2019 than in 2016. The state’s experience is part…
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Here’s what could help save more black infants’ lives. But NC isn’t doing it.
News and Observer Deaths of African-American babies declined most quickly in states that expanded Medicaid coverage, researchers have found. North Carolina isn’t one of those states. … Joan Alker, executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University, said the conclusions about insurance improving infant health make sense. As it stands in…
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#ListenToBlackWomen: Maternal and infant health care advocates tell North Carolina
North Carolina Health News By: Anna Blythe The racial disparities are more pronounced in North Carolina than much of the country, both for maternal health and infant mortality rates… Adam Searing, a research professor at the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families, pointed out that Medicaid expansion states have reduced the percentage of uninsured…
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States that Expanded Medicaid are Helping to Protect Children from Becoming Uninsured
Our annual report on the state of children’s coverage is out. It’s a deep dive into a disturbing trend – children across the country are losing affordable health coverage, rolling back gains started with the Affordable Care Act. One main cause of this drop in coverage is easily fixed. The 14 states that haven’t expanded…
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When Early Childhood Educators are Covered, Kids Win: Stories from North Carolina
If you, like me, have the peace of mind of knowing that your toddler or preschooler is well cared for and supported while you’re at work, you probably know already that you’re incredibly fortunate. I am grateful every day for the many early childhood teachers who make the safety, educational success, and wellbeing of a…
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2016 Maps
The interactive maps and data for 2016 provide information on the percent of adults and children covered by Medicaid and/or CHIP.You can embed these maps on your website by selecting a state on the left then copying the embed code on the right side of the map and pasting it into a post on your…
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MACPAC Releases Medicaid Eligibility, Enrollment and Renewal Case Studies Examining New Data-Driven Processes
Before the holidays, MACPAC and its contractor, SHADAC, (the State Health Access Data Assistance Center at the University of Minnesota) released findings of a study that examined the status of the new data-driven enrollment and renewal processes enacted as part of the Affordable Care Act. The case studies report on how six states – Arizona,…
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Midterm Elections Improve Prospects for Medicaid Expansion in North Carolina
The loss of Republican supermajorities in the North Carolina House and Senate in the recent midterms was the first sign of an improving climate for expanding Medicaid in the Tarheel state. Now when Democratic Governor Roy Cooper exercises his veto power, Democrats in the legislature can block legislation – including the annual state budget bill…
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Nation’s Progress on Children’s Health Coverage Reverses Course
Introduction For the first time since comparable data was first collected in 2008, the nation’s steady progress in reducing the number of children without health insurance reversed course. The number of uninsured children under age 19[note] This report examines children under age 19 because of changes to the health insurance age categories in the 2017…
