Medicaid
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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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Samantha Garvey Helps Shed Light on the Plight of the 1 in 45 Children who are Homeless
By: Tara Mancini and Joan Alker Editor’s Note: Like so many others, we were touched by the story of Samantha Garvey, an inspirational homeless student from New York who is a finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search competition. She was invited to attend President Obama’s State of the Union address tonight as the guest…
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Foster Kids Need Services, Not More Prescriptions
By Laura Boyd, Foster Family-Based Treatment Association New light has been shed recently on the plight of foster youth and too limited application of individualized, clinically assessed psychosocial treatment protocols for these vulnerable youth. While the national child advocacy community and certain leaders on Capitol Hill have been concerned about the over-prescribing and/or inappropriate prescribing…
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Performing Under Pressure: Annual Findings of a 50-State Survey of Eligibility, Enrollment, Renewal, and Cost-Sharing Policies in Medicaid and CHIP, 2011-2012
Amid ongoing state budget pressures, a requirement in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that states maintain eligibility in Medicaid and CHIP was central in preserving coverage during 2011. In addition, more than half of states (29) made improvements in their programs. Most of these improvements involved greater use of technology to boost program efficiency and…
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Medicaid and CHIP – Performing Under Pressure
By Martha Heberlein and Tricia Brooks For those of you who have been anxiously awaiting (and you can count us, too!) the release of the annual survey on Medicaid and CHIP, today is your lucky day. In partnership with the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, we released “Performing Under Pressure: Annual Findings of…
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Essential Health Benefits: A Child’s Perspective
As soon as rumors started flying about what would be in the essential health benefits guidelines I thought hmmmm that sounds a lot like CHIP. At first blush the new guidance does sound like the CHIP model – indeed the guidance says as much (p. 8). But as HHS officials and others have pointed out,…
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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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First Focus Calls for Greater Investment in Children
By Tara Mancini Over the past 35 years, our nation’s GDP has increased by 168 percent, yet those gains are mostly missing from the picture when viewing from the perspective of the Child and Youth Well-Being Index (CWI). Over that same time period, the quality of life for children has increased by just a little…
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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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Coming Soon to a State Near You? Wisconsin seeks to preview a slasher triple feature
By Jon Peacock, Wisconsin Council on Children and Families A drama has been slowly unfolding in Wisconsin relating to the shape of the state’s Medicaid program. If it were made into a movie, it would be a slasher film with an unwilling cast of nearly half of the 780,000 people enrolled in Wisconsin’s highly successful…
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Examining Medicaid Managed Long-Term Service and Support Programs: Key Issues To Consider
By Laura Summer, Georgetown University Health Policy Institute (Editor’s Note: Given the increasing interest in Medicaid managed care among states eager to achieve cost-savings, we asked our colleague Laura Summer to blog for us on her latest report on managed care. Her report focused on long-term care services but it provides some helpful insights into broader…
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Proposed Medicaid Premiums Challenge Coverage for Florida’s Children and Parents
Florida’s proposed changes to its Medicaid program include a requirement for nearly all Medicaid beneficiaries, including children, who are enrolled in managed-care plans to pay a $10 monthly premium as a condition for Medicaid eligibility. This could result in 800,000 Florida children and parents – the majority of them children in very-low-income families –leaving Florida…
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Looking Ahead to 2012, What Changes Are In Store for Florida’s Medicaid Program?
Medicaid is a critical part of Florida’s health care system. It covers 3.1 million people in the state, the majority of whom are children. In 2006, a five-year pilot program that replaced traditional Medicaid with an unusual managed-care model and other features that required a Section 1115 waiver from the federal government. In 2012, there…
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Florida’s Progress on Children’s Health Would Unravel if Plan is Approved
Just last week we released a report commending Florida for making significant progress in reducing the number of uninsured children between 2008 and 2010. Today, we are releasing a report that shows Florida will unravel much of that progress if allowed to go forward with proposed changes to its Medicaid program that include the imposition…
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“Medicaid.Gov:” A New Resource for Medicaid Stakeholders
Medicaid stakeholders have a new resource to mine in “Medicaid.Gov.” CMS opened the mine on Monday for prospecting and you’re bound to find, through the site’s updated search functionality, some of those elusive nuggets of information previously not available or buried so deep within the old CMS website that no amount of blasting could unearth.…
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Improving Coverage for Children Under Health Reform Will Require Maintaining Current Eligibility Standards For Medicaid and CHIP
When the Affordable Care Act of 2010 is fully implemented, it will extend health insurance coverage to many adult Americans who currently lack it. It is not known, however, how the health reform legislation will affect children and parents who would otherwise be uninsured. Based on this analysis, health reform has the potential to cut…
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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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Despite Economic Challenges, Progress Continues: Children’s Health Insurance Coverage in the United States from 2008-2010
In this paper, health insurance data from the Census Bureau’s annual “American Community Survey” was analyzed in order to get a more accurate depiction of children’s coverage. Even though the number of children living in poverty has increased almost 19 percent over a three-year period, the number of children without health insurance declined 14 percent–…
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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…