Financing

Financing

Kaiser Survey Finds Medicaid Spending Growth is Down

By Tara Mancini Last week’s release of the Kaiser Family Foundation’s 50-State Medicaid Budget Survey for State Fiscal Years 2012 and 2013 brings encouraging news.  The big picture findings from this 12th annual survey indicate that growth in both total Medicaid spending and enrollment were down in 2012.  Medicaid enrollment is projected to grow at […]

Report Sheds Light on Block Grants

We’ve heard a lot about how block-granting Medicaid will allow states more flexibility but we haven’t heard much about the potential impact such a proposal might have on low-income families.  The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently issued a report that sheds light on that issue. CBPP’s report, “How States Have Spent Federal and […]

More Interesting Tidbits from the CBO ACA Score

By Martha Heberlein Our blog post from last week gave the high-level numbers of CBO’s updated score on the ACA, but we wanted to pass along a few more nuggets. If a state fails to extend Medicaid to low-income uninsured adults, it will increase the cost of covering Exchange participants. In states that elect to […]

Medicaid Controls Health Care Costs Better than Other Insurers

By Tara Mancini Since 2008, we’ve heard reports about growing Medicaid enrollment and consequently, a rise in its cost (which was mainly incurred by the federal government). Of course we now know that the increases in Medicaid enrollment, and subsequently Medicaid spending, coincided with the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. And by now, Say […]

House Budget Committee Reports Out Bill to Eliminate MOE & CHIPRA Bonus

By Jocelyn Guyer In an effort to circumvent the bipartisan debt ceiling agreement reached last year, the House Budget Committee passed a measure Monday that, if enacted, would undermine the success our nation has achieved in driving the uninsured rate for children down to a record low.  (It has numerous other issues as well, and […]

Block Grants – Success or Failure? You Be the Judge

By Jocelyn Guyer Whether you view something as a success or failure often depends upon which side of the field you are standing. On one side of the block-granting field, we have low-income families who lost the helping hand they needed during tough economic times as the block-granted TANF program failed to respond to the […]