Eligibility & Enrollment
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CCF Research Helps Inform Debate over Reinstating Arizona KidsCare
Last week, I was in Phoenix, Arizona to testify at a hearing in the House of Representatives Health Committee on KidsCare. As Say Ahhh! readers know, the changes to KidsCare in the last several years created a unique research opportunity because Arizona is the only state without a functioning Children’s Health Insurance Program. My colleagues…
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Administration’s Budget Proposal Would Make Medicaid Expansion an Even Better Deal for Wisconsin and Other States
By Jon Peacock and Sashi Gregory, Wisconsin Council on Children and Families The proposed budget released this week by President Obama would make the expansion of Medicaid an even better deal for states like Wisconsin that have not yet taken up the option. If Wisconsin expanded BadgerCare (Wisconsin’s Medicaid program) eligibility in January 2017, the…
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2016 Federal Poverty Levels Are Out; What Does This Mean for the Marketplace and Medicaid?
Last week, the 2016 federal poverty levels (FPL) were published in the federal register. How does this impact consumers applying for coverage through the Marketplace, Medicaid or CHIP? Let’s start with eligibility for Marketplace subsidies. For 2016 calendar year coverage, regardless of when someone applies or enrolls, eligibility is based on the 2015 FPL levels.…
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“Healthy Students” Initiative Seeks to Help Children Achieve Better Health & Academic Success
Health care coverage helps children show up for school ready to learn and provides parents with the peace of mind of knowing they can afford to get their children the care they need to succeed. Sadly, many of America’s children are going without affordable coverage even though they are eligible for Medicaid or CHIP but…
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Little Known Provision Keeps Kids From Slipping Through Cracks Due to Differences in Eligibility Rules
For the most part, the Affordable Care Act aligns the way that Medicaid determines eligibility based on the same Modified Adjusted Gross Income (MAGI) rules used to determine eligibility for financial assistance in the Marketplace. But there are exceptions in Medicaid as I outlined in this blog. The differences can mean that an individual is…
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Survey Shows States Made Significant Progress Implementing Data-Driven Eligibility in Medicaid
Eligibility decisions made in real-time or overnight when someone submits a Medicaid application? Automated determinations of ongoing eligibility at renewal without requiring enrollees to fill out forms or send in paperwork? It wasn’t too long ago that many Medicaid stakeholders would have thought those were pie-in-the sky notions. Yet, thanks to new high-performing eligibility systems…
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NEACH Summit Highlights Continuous Battle for Health Care Access and Coverage for Children
By Ben Koller, Community Catalyst Last month, children’s health advocates and experts from around New England gathered for the New England Alliance for Children’s Health’s (NEACH) annual Children’s Health Care Summit. NEACH, an initiative of Community Catalyst, is a broad-based coalition of health advocates, providers, and legal experts dedicated to improving children’s access to high-quality,…
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Permanent 90/10 Rule Will Help States Continue Efforts to Modernize IT Systems
Although final publication of the 90/10 rule – providing generous, enhanced federal funding for Medicaid eligibility and enrollment systems – doesn’t quite bring the surprise of opening an unexpected holiday gift, it is still gives us many reasons to celebrate. If CMS had allowed the enhanced funding to expire as initially planned, states would have…
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Premium Assistance and Wrapped Benefits Part 2: A Startling Discovery
As I blogged about last week, our recent report with co-authors at the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured looked at wrapped benefits and how they are working in selected Section 1906 premium assistance programs. The most startling discovery to me was the finding that families have no cost-sharing protections in the programs we…
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No QHPs Comparable to CHIP, Says (Delayed) HHS Certification
Like many others that watch child health policy closely, we have been anxiously awaiting release of the months-overdue Congressionally-mandated study comparing CHIP with coverage children receive through qualified health plans (QHPs) in the marketplaces. Released just before Thanksgiving, the HHS certification summary reinforces what growing evidence has indicated: No QHPs were found comparable to CHIP. Not…
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Children’s Health Coverage: On the road to 100 percent?
by Ben Kerman, Atlantic Philanthropies The 2015 open enrollment period offers an opportunity to build on tremendous progress in bringing health coverage to more children and their families. An analysis of recent census data by Georgetown Center on Children and Families confirms that many states are making headway. Twenty five states achieved statistically significant decreases…
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More Evidence that Medicaid Expansion Helps State Budgets
Recently, Kaiser Family Foundation released a report on Medicaid Enrollment & Spending Growth for FY 2015 and 2016. There is a lot of interesting data in the report, but the stand out finding confirms what we already know: Medicaid expansion is good for state budgets and leads to increases in coverage. Medicaid Enrollment is up…
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Healthcare.Gov Promises a Snazzier Production for OE3
Yesterday marked the debut of the third open enrollment period for the Health Insurance Marketplaces, including Healthcare.gov, which is the storefront to the Marketplace in 37 states. Has the performance improved? What new bells and whistles will delight the audience? Faster lines at the box office. Although it looks the same to consumers, new account…
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Child Uninsured Rate Hits Historic Low – Thanks Goes Mainly to ACA, Medicaid & CHIP
Like many of you I was super excited to see the first round of data from the Census Bureau looking at health insurance rates in 2014 when it came out in late September. Needless to say, 2014 was a big year for health policy changes! Today we are releasing our annual report focused specifically on…
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Half of the Uninsured are Eligible for ACA Coverage
by Jordan Messner, Graduate Research Intern The Kaiser Family Foundation published a report on October 13 examining the uninsured population in the United States and their options for coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The report found that although 32.3 million nonelderly people were uninsured at the beginning of 2015, 49% of these individuals (15.7…
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More People Have Health Coverage in Every State Thanks to ACA; Yet Some of the Poorest are Being Left Behind
by Suzanne Wikle, Projector Director, Advancing Strategies for Aligning Programs, CLASP When President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law, advocates hailed it as the most important health legislation since the creation of Medicaid and Medicare in 1965 — and one of the most important anti-poverty laws in decades as well. The monumental…
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Arkansas’s Health Care Reform Forum: Medicaid Expansion and the Private Option
How has the Affordable Care Act and health care reform directly affected consumers and access to health care? How does Medicaid expansion relate to the broader health reform effort? How has Arkansas’s Private Option affected the state’s health care system? What makes a premium assistance model appealing for health care Arkansas and other states? These…
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Many working parents in Georgia would benefit from closing health coverage gap
by Cindy Zeldin, Executive Director, Georgians for a Healthy Future It’s often assumed that if you have a job, you have health insurance. That’s not the case for many working families in Georgia, though, because our state leaders haven’t accepted the federal funding set aside for us to extend cost-effective Medicaid coverage to more uninsured…
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New Health Insurance Data Shows More Kentucky Kids are Covered
By Terry Brooks, Kentucky Youth Advocates New health insurance data recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau revealed that health insurance coverage rates for both children and adults increased in Kentucky from 2013 to 2014. The one-year estimates from the American Community Survey revealed that 95.7 percent of Kentucky children under 18 had health insurance in…
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Child and Parent Health Issues Can Lead to Chronic Absenteeism & Impact Student Success
Editor’s Note: Yesterday we published the first half of our interview with Hedy Chang of Attendance Works. She explained how child and parent health issues can become a barrier to school attendance and future success. Today we conclude the interview. Q: Many of the health barriers to attendance that your report mentions are preventable and/or treatable…