CHIP
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Florida Children’s Health Expert Shares Insights on Major Turning Point for Immigrant Kids
By Diana Ragbeer, The Children’s Trust On Thursday, March 17, Governor Rick Scott signed HB 5101 into law, thereby lifting the five-year waiting period for lawfully residing immigrant children to receive subsidized CHIP and Medicaid through Florida KidCare. This makes Florida the 31st state to take advantage of the provision known as the Legal Immigrant Children’s…
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A Primer on Health Care Quality Measurement and Improvement for Children in Medicaid and CHIP
When I was the CHIP Director in New Hampshire, we thought that achieving a 95% rate of coverage for kids was the high bar. As a country, we are not only closing in on that goal, but leading states have raised the bar to 98% and beyond. And while we must continue to eliminate disparities…
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Measuring and Improving Health Care Quality for Children in Medicaid and CHIP: A Primer for Child Health Stakeholders
A large body of evidence shows that, compared to low-income uninsured children, Medicaid has been highly successful in providing children with a usual source of care and regular well-child care while significantly reducing unmet or delayed needs for medical care, dental care, and prescription drugs due to costs. Nonetheless, quality improvement centers on the notion…
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Research Shows that Utah and Florida’s “ICHIA Option” Will Improve Access to Health Coverage and Services For Lawfully Residing Immigrant Children
Last week, both the Utah and Florida legislatures passed laws that extend Medicaid and CHIP coverage to lawfully residing children who would otherwise have had to wait five years before becoming eligible to enroll. This is a big victory in two states with some of the highest child uninsurance rates in the country. Related Content…
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Breaking News: U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee Moves to Cut CHIP Funding
The Congressional budget process appears to be in a fair amount of chaos with Senate and House Republicans at risk of failing to agree with each other even on a Budget Resolution. While that is not surprising — given the state of disarray in Congress — I was surprised to see that the House Energy…
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CHIP Bump Brings About Coverage Gains for Kids in Florida and Utah
Just a few hours ago, the Florida legislature passed its final bills of the session and included an extension of Medicaid and CHIP coverage to lawfully residing immigrant children who are currently excluded for five years. Known to many as the “ICHIA option”, this was a huge victory for kids in Florida (and their advocates…
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CMS Releases 2015 Report on the Quality of Health Care for Children in Medicaid and CHIP
Now that CMS has released the fifth annual Quality of Health Care for Children in Medicaid and CHIP, let’s take a look at the highlights of the children’s report. First, some background: the 2009 CHIP Reauthorization Act launched a wide-ranging set of initiatives to advance pediatric health care quality measurement and improvement. At the top…
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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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President’s Final Budget Includes Several Provisions to Help Children and Families
President Obama released his final budget proposal and included a number of provisions that would help improve health coverage for children and families. Those provisions include the following: • Fully funding CHIP through FY 2019. Last year, CHIP funding was extended through FY 2017 maintaining an important source of coverage for about 8 million children.…
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Medicaid and CHIP Eligibility, Enrollment, Renewal, and Cost-Sharing Policies as of January 2016: Findings from a 50-State Survey
Executive Summary January 2016 marks the end of the second full year of implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) key coverage provisions. This 14th annual 50-state survey of Medicaid and CHIP eligibility, enrollment, renewal, and cost-sharing policies provides a point-in-time snapshot of policies as of January 2016 and identifies changes in policies that occurred…
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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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A Gift for New Parents for the New Year
by Lorraine Gonzalez, Kate Breslin and Elisabeth Benjamin, Health Care for All NY On December 22, 2015, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a law (S4745/A7155) that will allow babies born into low and middle-income New York families eligible for the Child Health Plus (CHP), New York’s Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), from the day that…
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Arizona Kids are Falling Through the Cracks Without Active KidsCare Program
by Joe Fu, Children’s Action Alliance For the fifth year in a row, Arizona had the third highest child uninsured rate in the nation. In 2014, 10% of Arizona’s children were uninsured compared to about 6% nationally, according to a new report we released this week with Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families. This…
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Children’s Health Coverage in Arizona: How Are Children Doing Without KidsCare?
Arizona, with its large number of uninsured residents, was primed to make major progress in 2014 with the full implementation of the Affordable Care Act. With the adoption of the Medicaid expansion, the state did see coverage improvements that mirrored national trends. Yet the state’s decision to dismantle KidsCare meant some Arizona children likely fell…
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Awakening the Force of Two-Generations’ (Children and their Parents) Coverage, Access and Affordability: Historic Gains Worth Celebrating in 2016
By Liane Wong, Dr.P.H. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation While there’s been an incredible amount of buzz around the release of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” this December, a less heralded moment in history was made at the end of 2015. But it’s history worth celebrating for our nation’s families and children, and one…
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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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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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$32 Million Now Available to Help Reach Eligible but Unenrolled Kids
Most uninsured children are eligible for Medicaid or CHIP but are not yet enrolled so finding them and helping them enroll is critical to successfully reducing the uninsured rate for children. As my colleague Tricia Brooks has pointed out many times, it is no secret that sustained outreach and enrollment support is the key to…
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Estimating 2016 Federal CHIP Allotments (and the bump!)
If you’re like us at CCF, you’ve been really curious about 2016 CHIP allotments under the recent CHIP extension in MACRA. We worked with our friends at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to estimate federal allotments for the 2016 federal fiscal year (1st column), which began October 1, using state-reported May estimates of…
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Obama Administration Should Release Long Awaited CHIP/QHP Study
Some of you may remember that the Affordable Care Act included a provision that required the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to review and certify the comparability of pediatric coverage of qualified health plans to the benefits and cost-sharing of CHIP plans in each state. In fact this analysis was supposed to be…