Enrollment Assistance
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SNAP! And 153,000 California Children Can Get No-Cost Health Insurance Without an Application
By Kristen Golden Testa, The Children’s Partnership Imagine your infant has a high fever and you want to bring her to the doctor but don’t have health insurance. Or your young child can’t concentrate at school due to a tooth ache and you can’t afford to go to the dentist without coverage. Now imagine, one…
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Find a Baseline and Set Standards for Hospital Presumptive Eligibility From There
As we approach the Winter Olympics, I was thinking about how the world’s elite athletes achieve such high standards of performance. It’s a rarity that such athletes emerge from the unknown at the top of their fields. It takes training, coaching, assessing, testing new techniques, making adjustments and, over time with lots of practice, top…
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Here’s the Latest on Mandate Exemptions
By Joe Touschner Now that 2014 is here, the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate is in effect to encourage individuals and families to maintain health coverage. This year, though, will be a transition year for many when they won’t face any penalty for reasonable gaps in coverage. We’ve learned more about how the individual mandate…
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Federal Court Ruling: Navigator Laws Cannot Impose Additional Requirements on Navigators and Other Assisters in Federal Marketplace States
A federal district court ruling yesterday regarding Missouri’s navigator law has the health coverage community abuzz. As I noted in this Say Ahhh! blog, a number of states have proposed or passed legislation to require additional training and licensing for navigators, and sometimes other assisters, and restrict the activities they are required to perform by…
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Unreasonable Standards Will Likely Discourage Hospitals from Doing Presumptive Eligibility
I’ve written several Say Ahhh! blogs on the Affordable Care Act’s new hospital presumptive eligibility provisions. The ACA explicitly gives hospitals the prerogative to make Medicaid presumptive eligibility (PE) decisions, regardless of whether the state has previously implemented the policy option. In particular, presumptive eligibility provides a great opportunity for hospitals to connect uninsured kids…
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Patience and Flexibility Needed as Those with New Insurance Start Using Health Care Services After January 1
Now that healthcare.gov is working much better and enrollment numbers are rising, it is a good time to think about being prepared for the January 1 launch of new coverage. Beyond counting enrollment, the media are already focused on what will happen to those who sign up for insurance effective on January 1. If Sophie…
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Senate Finance Committee to Consider Medicaid and CHIP Extensions
Today, the Senate Finance Committee released a draft summary and description of the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) repeal, or “doc fix,” bill that committee will take up Thursday morning. While the Medicare “doc fix,” a move to permanently change the way Medicare pays providers, is the committee’s featured event, the Chairman’s Mark also seeks…
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Another Reason to Be Thankful: Sixteen States to Eliminate CHIP Waiting Periods
While we’re still celebrating our nation’s continued success in improving coverage for children, there’s another reason to be thankful. As news has trickled in over the past few months about states eliminating their CHIP waiting periods, CCF teamed up with MACPAC staff to take stock of where things stand. And the good news is that…
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National League of Cities Awards 12 Cities Planning Grants for Health Benefit Outreach Campaign
By Wesley Prater As part of the NLC’s Cities Expanding Health Care Access for Children and Families Initiative, funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies, 12 cities recently were awarded planning grants up to $30,000 to develop citywide outreach campaigns, focused on enrolling eligible children and families in Medicaid and CHIP. During a six-month planning period, the…
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New Resource for Assisters Covers Private Insurance and Market Plans
Almost two months into open enrollment for the new Health Insurance Marketplaces, it is clear consumer assistance is essential to helping people understand their coverage options. Fortunately, the ACA anticipated this need by requiring the marketplaces to have Navigators who will help consumers compare options and enroll in coverage. The Administration and states are also…
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Asian Pacific Islander American Health Forum Joins CCF to Champion Children’s Coverage
By Priscilla Huang, Asian Pacific Islander American Health Forum I had the opportunity to join health policy experts from Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities for a panel discussion today hosted by New American Media, discussing encouraging findings in CCF’s latest report on the status of…
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Ready, Set to Enroll? Medicaid Eligibility and Enrollment on the Cusp of 2014
By Martha Heberlein and Tricia Brooks Of late, most of the media attention on ACA implementation has focused on the technical glitches in the federal (and to a lesser extent state) marketplaces and the end of inadequate individual insurance plans, while state Medicaid agencies have been hard at work behind the scenes revamping their business…
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Pitching in to Connect the 5.3 Million Uninsured Children with Coverage
Yesterday we released our annual report on uninsured children. While childhood poverty remains high, we were happy to report that Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) have helped drive the uninsured rate for children down to record lows. While we celebrate the success of all the community leaders, children’s health advocates, state and…
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My Take on the HHS Enrollment Numbers
As we like to say here inside the Beltway, its all about your baseline… So I am actually somewhat pleasantly surprised by the numbers HHS just released. I had very low expectations like everyone else. What seems encouraging to me is the level of interest – between the state and federal marketplace websites there have…
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CHIP’S Start: Early Lessons for Health Reform
By Matt Broaddus, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities The Administration is expected to issue estimates this week of enrollment since October 1 in health reform’s Medicaid expansion and its new health insurance marketplaces — and some media have already reported that the numbers did not meet Administration expectations. But, as we’ve learned by examining the early experience with…
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Beware of Rush to Judgment Based on Early Enrollment Numbers
As we await the first set of marketplace enrollment numbers from HHS, we need to maintain perspective. The Medicare Part D experience tells us that enrolling for a new health benefit is not something you expect to do quickly. As of the equivalent first month report in the fall of 2005, 10 percent of those…
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Medicaid Enrollment is Up – as Expected
By Edwin Park, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities Media reports have expressed surprise, even concern, that early enrollment in Medicaid under health reform has outpaced enrollment in the new health insurance marketplaces so far. But, that was expected to happen, even before the well-documented technical problems affecting HealthCare.gov, the federal marketplace website. The fact is, the…
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Helping Consumers Understand Their Coverage Options from Coast to Coast
By Sarah Dash, Kevin Lucia, and Justin Giovannelli of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms To help consumers enroll in the recently opened health insurance marketplaces, the Affordable Care Act created outreach and consumer assistance positions such as “navigators,” in-person assisters, and certified application counselors. Although awareness of the marketplaces and the financial help they may offer has…
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And Another Thing (or two) On Inaccurate Reporting About Medicaid and the ACA …
Perhaps the most egregious error I have seen in recent reporting on Medicaid enrollment and this ACA is from a recent report in CBS News. A CBS News analysis shows that in many of the 15 state-based health insurance exchanges more people are enrolling in Medicaid rather than buying private health insurance. And if that…
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Reality Check: Interest in New Coverage Options and Support for Medicaid Expansion Strong
Amidst all the noise, a new Commonwealth Fund survey provides a helpful reality check that focuses our attention back where it should be: on actual uninsured Americans and how they are approaching the new coverage options available to them. This information is super-current and comes directly from a survey of Americans and not from state…