Marketplace
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Utah’s Exchange Shifts Cost to Families
Editor’s Note: Just over a year ago, CCF and our colleagues at Georgetown’s Center for Health Insurance Reforms released a paper examining the health insurance exchanges operating in Utah and Massachusetts. We concluded that they should not be viewed as ideological “bookends” but rather as entities with different goals that had taken different steps to attract…
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Will Funding for the ACS Continue? (I hope so!)
By Martha Heberlein As I’m sure you can tell from our multitude of blogs – we at CCF love the ACS! With its large sample size, it’s allowed us (and all our friends out in the states) to dig into data in smaller slices of the country. With the recognition that once-a-decade data collection is not…
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Covering Parents is Good For Kids: 4.9 Million Uninsured Stand to Gain Coverage
As any parent who has faced the challenge of being sick and trying to fulfill his or her parenting duties will tell you – the well-being of children is highly dependent on the well-being of their parents. My bottomline is covering parents is good for kids. While we’ve made great strides in bringing down the…
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A Focus on Children and Youth in the Nuts and Bolts of an Exchange
By Mike Odeh, Children Now School might be out for summer – but not for California’s Health Benefit Exchange board! The board has scheduled at least two full meetings in June, and is absorbing a small encyclopedia’s worth of reports. These extensive analyses touch on some of the many important “nuts and bolts” decisions that…
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New Study Finds Massachusetts Health Reform is Good for Kids
By Tara Mancini Massachusetts’ 2006 health reform law is frequently a topic of research and debate. However, few studies have specifically focused on how children have fared as a result of the reform. That is until this recent study published in the American Economic Review that focuses solely on children under 18 and the impact that…
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IRS Releases Final Premium Tax Credit Rule
By Martha Heberlein The final premium tax credit rule was published in the Federal Register on May 23rd. The rule, which describes eligibility for the health insurance premium tax credits, pretty much finalized what was proposed back in August. (For a summary on the math behind the calculations, check out HealthReformGPS.) However, there are a few interesting things…
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Six States Explore More Efficient Ways to Provide Family Benefits
For those of us who appreciate the opportunities and challenges states face in implementing the Affordable Care Act, it is easy to get wrapped up in making sure the expanded health coverage programs are streamlined and well coordinated. Much of the work ahead relies on having sophisticated IT systems that will revolutionize the eligibility and…
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Access to Care for Adults Has Diminished Over the Past 10 Years
By Martha Heberlein A recent article in Health Affairs finds that access to care for adults has deteriorated in the last decade. The likelihood of having a usual source of care, an office visit, or seeing a dentist all declined. At the same time, the likelihood of visiting an emergency room rose slightly. Adults were…
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Youth in Foster Care Can Benefit Greatly from ACA, but Need Advocates to Act Now to Make Sure They Do
By Ginny Puddefoot, The Children’s Partnership Thanks to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), youth who are in foster care on their 18th birthday will soon have access to extended health insurance coverage through Medicaid until reaching the age of 26. This represents a huge benefit to these young people–and a major challenge for all…
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The Complex Modern Family and Barriers to Children’s Health Coverage
By Gene Lewit, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation Children with health insurance coverage start off life on the right foot: they are healthier, miss fewer days of school and their parents and guardians miss less work. Happily, recent efforts to grow and strengthen Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program have extended coverage to…
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New Guidance on Federally-Facilitated Exchanges Will Have a Super-Sized Impact
By Jocelyn Guyer Last week, HHS released new guidance on how it will operate federally-facilitated exchanges (FFE) in states that are not ready to operate their own. It is a sparse 19-pages, but it will have a super-sized impact on how ACA is implemented in the months and years ahead. We now are looking at…
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Employer-Sponsored Insurance Declining More Rapidly for Low-Wage Workers
A recent report from the Urban Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation underscores that when it comes to health insurance provided on the job, the less you make the less you get. Take a look at the chart below which illustrates the decline in employer-sponsored coverage by income level. The lowest paid workers –…
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Making Sure Primary Care’s Pay Raise Gets Implemented
Ever had an employer promise you a raise and not deliver? Sure, occasionally the payroll department delays getting the money in your paycheck, but generally speaking, you expect your employer to follow-through. Will this be the case with the mandatory bump-up in Medicaid payment rates to Medicare-equivalent levels for primary care services? Wonk-warning ahead –…
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Medical Homes: Local Focus, Better Health
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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House Passes Sequester Replacement Bill – Could Impact Kids Health Care
By Jocelyn Guyer Today the House of Representatives passed the “Sequester Replacement Reconciliation Act”. As we’ve mentioned before, the Senate is not planning to take up the measure and the Administration has issued a veto threat should the lopsided measure reach the President’s desk. Despite those assurances, it is worth looking into the measure as…
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Have You Thanked a Nurse Lately?
I’m really bad at keeping up with all these national days, weeks and months of recognition. I somehow missed the opportunity to indulge on National Potato Chip Day (March 14). I didn’t even notice that Ohio Governor Kasich signed a proclamation earlier this year designating February 6 as National Pork Rind Day. But today I…
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Affordable Care Act: Legislation, Regulation and Guidance
Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families contributes an independent voice to the dialogue on how to most effectively make the promise of the Affordable Care Act a reality for children and families.
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A Question of Priorities
By Martha Heberlein As the Energy and Commerce Committee searches for options to save the Department of Defense from cuts, coverage for millions of children, parents, pregnant women, the elderly, and people with disabilities could end up on the chopping block. This is just one of a number of distressing offsets that also includes repealing…
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A Question of Priorities
By Martha Heberlein As the Energy and Commerce Committee searches for options to save the Department of Defense from cuts, coverage for millions of children, parents, pregnant women, the elderly, and people with disabilities could end up on the chopping block. This is just one of a number of distressing offsets that also includes repealing exchange…