CHIP
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Get Covered: Get In the Game Initiative is a Great Idea
By Suzanne Schlattman, Maryland Citizens’ Health Initiative Education Fund, Inc. This week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the Get Covered. Get in the Game initiative which will be launched in seven pilot states across the country including: Colorado, Florida, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Ohio and Wisconsin. The initiative brings together coaches, schools, and communities to educate families with children…
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Moms Rising, Fran Drescher & HHS Discuss Preventive Care Provisions of Affordable Care Act
Moms Rising members had an opportunity to ask Secretary Sebelius questions about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) during a recent webchat hosted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Actress Fran Drescher, founder of Cancer Schmancer, joined the conversation and spoke about how the ACA’s preventive care provisions and insurance reforms will help…
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Covering Kids and Families Network Shares Tips on Back-to-School Enrollment Efforts; CMS to Host Follow-up Webinar Thursday
Summer vacation is not even half over and I’m already thinking about getting my kids ready to go back-to school. It’s not that I don’t enjoy their company; I just want to get a jump-start on my to-do list so that I deliver them to school ready to learn. Along with back-to-school shopping, they need…
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Insurance Commissioners Meet on Exchanges: Medicaid and CHIP
Last week, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners held a first of many planned meetings on health care reform. In many ways, state insurance commissioners, have become the front lines of health reform implementation as they are responsible for ensuring that health plans are compliant with the insurance reforms in the Affordable Care Act and they…
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Wisconsin Shows How States Can Mitigate the Downside of New Puerto Rico Law
By Jon Peacock, Wisconsin Council on Children and Families It isn’t often that state policymakers have to make program changes and policy choices because of a law passed in another state or territory of the U.S. Thus, it came as a big surprise to learn that a law enacted in Puerto Rico forces states to…
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Advocates Can Guide and Support Efforts to Advance Children’s Coverage: Reports Show How
By Eugene Lewit and Liane Wong The David and Lucile Packard Foundation The percent of uninsured children has consistently declined, despite deterioration of coverage for adults and the economy. This is one of the significant but frequently overlooked good news stories of recent years. The gains in children’s coverage have been due in large part to…
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CCF Comments to NAIC on Exchange Coordination with Medicaid and CHIP
CCF Comments to NAIC on Exchange Coordination with Medicaid and CHIP
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Governors Make the Case for Help with FMAP
This last weekend, the nation’s Governors came together for their annual meeting in Boston where the main topic of conversation was the economic crisis that continues to cripple state budgets. One of the key policies many of the Governors made a pitch for was an extension of fiscal relief for strapped states through the extension of…
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Many Children Lose Insurance When Parents Lose Jobs
By Jocelyn Guyer Dr. Fairbrother and her colleagues at Cincinnati Children’s hospital have just come out with an excellent new study that takes a clear-eyed look at how often children end up losing health coverage after a parent loses a job. The results are powerful, but not pretty — between 2000 and 2004, almost one…
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CHIP Tips: New Federal Funding Available to Cover Immigrant Children and Women
The recently enacted CHIP reauthorization law includes a number of programmatic and financing changes that affect both Medicaid and CHIP. One of these changes is a new option, often referred to as “ICHIA,” that allows states to receive federal funds for providing Medicaid and CHIP coverage to lawfully residing immigrant children and pregnant women regardless…
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CMS Issues Long-Awaited CHIPRA Guidance
Yesterday, CMS issued two additional guidance letters related to implementation of the Children’s Health Insurance Reauthorization Act (CHIPRA) of 2009. The first of these letters is on new federal support for covering for lawfully residing children and pregnant women who have been in the country less than five years. This long-awaited guidance explains that there…
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HealthCare.gov: Not Quite Amazon Yet but an Impressive Start
Today, HHS launched a web portal designed to provide families with a central place to go for information on health care coverage in their state. The folks at HHS must have been burning the midnight oil to get this done by the July 1st deadline created by Congress. Healthcare.gov is a remarkable accomplishment in such a…
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Congress Gives States Little to Celebrate at the Fiscal New Year
By Joe Touschner When I served as an aide in the Ohio Legislature, an annual tradition was the Rockin’ Fiscal New Year’s Eve Party, held on June 30th as a way for staffers to mark the end of the state’s fiscal year (and every other year, the end of a grueling budget process). With or…
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Web Portal to Be Launched This Week
” Beam me up Scotty!” – Captain Kirk Okay Trekkies, I realize Captain Kirk didn’t utter those exact words but it is the phrase that comes to mind whenever I hear the word “web portal“ bandied about. The new health care reform web portal (you’ll be able to find it at healthcare.gov), slated for launch on…
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Patients’ Bill of Rights Offers Important Protections for Children with Special Health Needs
Today President Obama held a press conference about a number of new regulations being issued by his Administration that he says constitute a new “Patients’ Bill of Rights”. Many of these new regulations have important ramifications for children who receive coverage through the private market and in particular, children with special health care needs. In…
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Getting it Right: State Policymakers Identify 10 Steps to Successful Implementation of Federal Health Reform
The National Academy of State Health Policy (NASHP) is an independent academy of state health policymakers working together to identify emerging issues, develop policy solutions, and improve state health policy and practice. Recently, its executive committee identified ten aspects of health reform that states must get right in order to successfully implement federal health reform.…
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Alaska Legislature Says “Yes” to Covering More Children; Governor Says “No”
Late this spring, the Alaska legislature overwhelmingly passed an expansion of Denali KidCare (Alaska’s CHIP program), from 175% to 200% of the FPL, a policy that Governor Parnell had indicated support for earlier this year, but switched directions on last week. Currently, Alaska is one of only three states that still doesn’t cover children at…
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Health Reform Eases Prohibition of Enrolling State Employee Kids in CHIP
I’m all for light meals but the smorgasbord offered by the health reform law is something we need to make reform meaningful and to ensure that all Americans have access to affordable health care. Whether you go straight to the entrees (the Medicaid expansion or subsidized coverage through exchanges) or nibble on the appetizers (no…
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Arizona Takes First Step to Restore Children’s Health Insurance
By Matt Jewett, Children’s Action Alliance of Arizona Not a lot of good news has come out of Arizona this year. Amidst leading the country in job losses, selling our state Capitol to raise money (we’re leasing it back), and a divisive immigration debate gaining national attention, we also became the first state ever to…
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Covering Kids & Families Coalitions Know Important Lessons for Health Reform
In 1997, just months before Congress enacted the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) announced a national grant program called “Covering Kids.” The concept was to overcome hurdles to Medicaid enrollment and retention through outreach, policy and procedural simplifications and coordination of coverage between programs. With the creation of CHIP,…