Last week, my colleague Joan Alker announced the publication of our latest report on the importance of Medicaid in rural areas and small towns around the country. She covered how as states “unwind” pandemic-era Medicaid continuous coverage protections, the reach of Medicaid in rural areas means negative effects there can be quite significant if states […]
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 […]
Today North Carolina’s Legislature passed Medicaid expansion in a bipartisan vote of 87-24. North Carolina’s Governor is expected to sign the bill early next week. This is a huge victory for better health care that will affect over 600,000 North Carolinians. I wrote last week about the multiple factors that set the stage for 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 […]
Our new factsheet, “State Fiscal Incentives for Medicaid Expansion Continue after the End of Public Health Emergency” lays out the substantial federal financial incentives for Medicaid expansion remaining available to non-expansion states after April 1, 2023 when states begin the process of ending Medicaid continuous coverage pandemic protections, which allowed beneficiaries to remain enrolled for […]
The end of the continuous coverage requirement will exacerbate and highlight the coverage gap in the 11 states still refusing the federal Medicaid expansion. Importantly, generous federal fiscal incentives are available to states that newly expand Medicaid. These incentives were enacted in 2020, and will remain available on a permanent basis to those 11 states. […]
