This blog is about the babies on the bus. You know, the ones who go “Wah-Wah-Wah” all around the town. It seems that, in the course of the PHE unwinding, some of them are getting thrown under the bus. As my colleague Elisabeth Wright Burak recently reported, Arkansas disenrolled 3,300 newborns from Medicaid in April; […]
Terminations of Medicaid eligibility are much in the news these days. While the large majority of disenrollments to date have been for procedural reasons, there are individuals who have been disenrolled after a state Medicaid agency has actually made a determination that the individual is ineligible. In these situations, the agency is required to determine […]
Medicaid (alongside the Children’s Health Insurance Program) covers more than half of all children in the U.S. and serves as the single largest payer of behavioral health services. Yet, timely access to mental health services remains elusive for many children and families. In June 2022, President Biden signed into law the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act […]
At the end of the COVID pandemic, more than half (54%) of the nation’s children were covered by Medicaid or CHIP; the vast majority by Medicaid. So, the lifting of the pandemic-related Medicaid continuous enrollment protection this spring is a really big deal, putting low-income children at risk of losing access to health care and/or […]
This year, there has been renewed focus in Congress on how to address the ongoing problem of drug shortages, especially with cancer patients now facing severe shortages of widely used generic chemotherapy drugs. On July 28, 2023, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers unveiled a draft bill intended to address the “root […]
Two and a half years ago, on January 8, 2021, with considerable fanfare, the Trump administration CMS announced the approval of a Medicaid “aggregate cap waiver” for Tennessee. The Governor was more forthcoming, trumpeting the state’s receipt of a “block grant waiver.” You say “aggregate cap,” I say “block grant,” let’s call the whole thing […]
