Financing
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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…
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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…
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Decisions, Decisions: ACOs in Medicaid
By Tara Mancini Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) have been in vogue for some time when it comes to coordinating care for Medicare patients; however, it is a relatively novel ideal for managing Medicaid populations. The populations covered by Medicaid differ vastly from that of Medicare, and therefore Medicaid ACOs require some different practices. A new…
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State Budget Woes? Take a Look at Revenues, Not Medicaid
By Martha Heberlein For those regular Say Ahhh! readers, you know we have long harped on accurately depicting the role of Medicaid in state budgets. When new data are released, we update our report or write another blog to try to correct a misrepresentation that Medicaid is solely responsible for state budget woes. Today we are releasing a…
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State Budget Woes: Revenue Declines, Not Medicaid Spending, are to Blame
As states have faced large budget deficits, some politicians have laid the blame at Medicaid’s doorstep, saying that the program’s costs are growing “out of control” and that it is “crowding out” other priorities. While spending in Medicaid has grown as a result of increased enrollment due to the recession, most of this added spending…
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Ryan Budget – Same Old Tune
and Martha Heberlein House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) released a budget plan we’re guessing will sound pretty familiar to you as it looks much like the plan he released last year. It would convert Medicaid to a block grant, deeply slashing federal funding by $810 billion over the next ten years (bigger than the…
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Medicaid Block Grants Reduce Flexibility & Less Responsive to Changing Need
House Budget Committee Chair, Paul Ryan, will soon release a budget that will likely include a Medicaid block grant. Meanwhile, I have been busy preparing for a debate on block grants in a class I’m taking. I found that block granting Medicaid is a risky idea because it would make the program less flexible for…
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HHS Gives States an Extension on Exchange Establishment Funding Requests
“Be careful what you wish for” is the adage that came to mind when HHS announced it planned to extend the final deadline for applying for Level II exchange establishment funding from June 29, 2012 to November 3, 2014. The announcement published in the federal register today proposed to set the rolling deadline for Level…
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President’s Budget Meets with Predictable Response in Unpredictable Year
By Jocelyn Guyer With the release of the President’s fiscal year 2013 budget proposal yesterday, CCF staff have begun the annual ritual of digging through lengthy documents and tables to untangle what it might mean for the health care coverage of children and families. It is a challenging task in the best of times, but…
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Medicaid Growth Slows; Medicaid Directors’ Innovative Efforts Expand
By Tara Mancini Overall, the economic conditions surrounding state Medicaid budgets are continuing to improve, even as states make their way through the first full budget year after the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act enhanced FMAP funding expired. In January 2012, unemployment hit a three year low of 8.3 percent, down from 9.4 percent a…
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Keeping Score -How Well Are Medicaid and CHIP Doing?
This week’s national football league conference championship games and the theme my colleague, Jocelyn Guyer, picked for her latest blog (where she admits to an obsession with Tom Brady) got me was thinking about statistics and scores as it relates to children’s coverage. While the uninsured rate is the final score, there are a lot…
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Maryland Kids Win with CHIPRA Performance Bonus
By Leigh Cobb, Advocates for Children and Youth and Suzanne Schlattman, Maryland Citizen’s Health Initiative Education Fund Maryland has just received its second Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (CHIPRA) performance bonus from CMS. This recognizes its efforts to identify and enroll eligible children in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Maryland enrolled…
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Paying Pharmacies Honest Prices for Prescription Drugs
As policymakers across the country look to balance their budgets, some are turning to Medicaid, recycling the same harmful policies they’ve used year-after-year: eliminating coverage for vulnerable Americans, restricting critical benefits like prescription drug coverage, imposing premiums on those who can’t afford them, and slashing already-low provider reimbursement rates. Community Catalyst and Georgetown University Health…
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Setting the Record Straight on Medicaid Spending
By Tara Mancini Last week, NASBO released their 2010 Report of State Expenditures and per usual, the top line message picked-up by most of the media was the large share of state expenditures used on Medicaid. However, there are always exceptions to the rule, and Kristen Stewart writing for a Salt Lake City Tribune Blog…
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States Still Recuperating, Outlook is Positive
By Tara Mancini The National Association of State Budget Officers just released their Fall 2011 Fiscal Survey of States. We have become accustomed to reading about Medicaid as one of the big-ticket items in state spending. While some detractors have reasoned that increased spending is emblematic of a broken program, NASBO gets it correct by…
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Medicaid & CHIP Bring Uninsured Rate for Children Down 14%
Even as unemployment and child poverty has grown, the uninsured rate for children has decreased by 14% nationwide, according to the report we just released today at back-to-back Capitol Hill briefings. It was great to share this good news at House and Senate briefings with overflowing crowds. The briefings were sponsored by the “Children’s Health…
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An Honest Look at State Budgets After ARRA Expires
By Tara Mancini Yesterday, three timely releases from the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured show that state budgets are beginning to turn around. The 11th annual 50-state survey of Medicaid budgets, coupled with an updated brief on state budgets in recession and recovery, and another on Medicaid provisions in ARRA (the stimulus bill)…
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Clock is Ticking for Super Committee
Today marks the deadline for Congressional standing committees to submit recommendations for spending cuts or revenue increases to the Super Committee (officially known as the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction). The clock is ticking as the Super Committee races (often behind closed doors) to meet its November 23rd deadline to report out a bill…
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Divide & Conquer: NC Speaker of House Tries to Pit Medicaid Beneficiaries Against One Another
By Adam Searing, North Carolina Justice Center Usually the North Carolina Speaker of the House, Thom Tillis, presents himself as a moderate, business-friendly Republican. Even as his party has enacted the largest cuts in the history of NC’s Medicaid program, he’s managed to keep the focus at local meetings around the state where he has…
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Together, Let’s #PutKids1st
By: O. Marion Burton, MD, FAAP, President, American Academy of Pediatrics The Budget Control Act of 2011 (Public Law 112-25), passed by Congress in August to raise the national $14.3 debt ceiling through 2012, called for the establishment of a 12-member, bipartisan Congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (JSC) to address the country’s long-term…