Medicaid
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In Medicaid Expansion States, Fewer Young Children Go Uninsured
Thanks to developments since the start of the new year, this post can start with some good news for young children: three more states have made progress toward expanding Medicaid. Last week, Kansas Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly and Republican Sen. Jim Denning announced plans to move forward to with Medicaid expansion when the legislative session…
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Fact Checking CMS Administrator’s Claim on Outreach and Enrollment Efforts for Kids
In a recent interview on the PBS News Hour, Kaiser Health News reporter Sarah Varney asked CMS Administrator Seema Verma about steps the administration is taking to address the troubling increase in the number of uninsured children and its connection to the decrease in child enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP. Readers of SayAhhh! are already…
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Responding to Trump Administration’s Troubling Medicaid Financing and Supplemental Payment Rule
On November 18, 2019, the Trump Administration issued a proposed Medicaid “Fiscal Accountability” rule that seriously threatens to upend state budgets and reduce beneficiaries’ access to needed care. The proposed rule, if finalized, could thus harm Medicaid beneficiaries, including children and families, as well as their health care providers, in most states. As Cindy Mann…
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The New Year Brings Good News to Uninsured Idahoans; Providers are Ready to Go
With all of the challenges facing the health care world these days, I decided to write my first blog of 2020 about some good news happening in Idaho. As of January 1st, over 50,000 Idahoans were enrolled in Medicaid expansion coverage finally bringing to fruition the ballot initiative passed handily by voters in November 2018.…
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How Medicaid Expansion Improved the Life of Idaho Mother Raising Two Children with Disabilities on Her Own
[Editor’s Note: Anita Sackuvich, a single mother with two disabled children who has been living without health insurance, joined Close the Gap Idaho at a press conference on January 6, 2020 to share her excitement about enrolling in coverage through Idaho’s Medicaid expansion. After facing mounting medical debt from a lifesaving surgery, Anita finally has health…
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South Carolina Becomes First State to Impose Harmful Work Requirements Primarily on Poor Parents
I had held out a little sliver of hope that the Trump Administration would not cross this line but today those hopes were extinguished when CMS Administrator Verma traveled to South Carolina to personally deliver the news to South Carolina Governor McMaster that his state would be the first in the nation to apply a…
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Early Childhood Investments Less Effective if Young Children Remain Uninsured
Today, we are releasing a companion report to our annual 50-state look at uninsured children with a focus on young children under age 6. Unfortunately, the U-turn we’ve seen in health coverage for children of all ages also extends to the nation’s infants, toddlers, and preschool-aged children. After a decade-plus of downward progress, since 2016…
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MAGI Application Processing Time Report Shows Modest Improvement in 2019
States are required to routinely report to CMS a number of performance indicators but few have been published to date. The most current and frequent data that are available publicly include application volume by source, determinations by program, and both Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) point-in-time enrollment (which CCF tracks and reports on…
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Nation’s Youngest Children Lose Health Coverage at an Alarming Rate
Introduction Until recently, the U.S. has experienced a consistent, annual decline in the number and rate of uninsured children in most states.[note]J. Alker and L. Roygardner, “The Number of Uninsured Children is on the Rise” (Washington: Georgetown University Center for Children and Families, October 2019), available at https://ccf.georgetown.edu/wp- content/uploads/2019/10/Uninsured-Kids-Report.pdf.[/note] Beginning in 2016, however, the trend…
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Latest CMS Data Show Slight Improvement in Decline in Child Enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP
Based on the recent release of final August 2019 enrollment data by CMS, the decline in child enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP improved ever so slightly from a 3 percent decline in the 18-month trend from December 2017 to June 2019 to a 2.9 percent decline over the 20-month period through August 2019. At the…
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Groundwork Ohio Seeks to Improve Managed Care Procurement to Advance a Vision for Young Children
When Governor DeWine took office in January of 2019, we began to see the platforms he campaigned upon, including his Opportunity for Every Ohio Kid agenda, begin to take form as his administration settled in and our state FY20-21 budget deliberations ensued in March. Among the new administration’s varied priorities, immediate attention was placed on…
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Latino Children’s Coverage
Having health insurance is important for children to grow and thrive. Latino children are more likely than other children to be uninsured, but efforts to reduce this coverage disparity by expanding affordable coverage options such as Medicaid, CHIP, and the Affordable Care Act paid off – the rate of uninsured Latino children decreased to historic…
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Medicaid Expansion Connects 25,000 More Virginia Kids and 110,000 Parents with Affordable Health Coverage
In just ten months, Medicaid expansion has helped Virginia connect over 340,000 adults to health coverage – including about 110,000 parents. Because of the well-known Medicaid “welcome mat” effect, so far about 25,000 Virginia children came in the door to coverage along with their parents. Most of these children were likely eligible for Medicaid or…
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The Opioid Epidemic’s Impact on Children Will Cost the U.S. Billions without Urgent Action
If we consider what children need as part of their healthy development, prevention and early intervention are most important. Children’s experiences, especially in the earliest years of rapid brain development, have an incredible impact on long-term health outcomes. And those same experiences are impacted by their parents’ health. The latest illustration: The opioid epidemic, which…
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Federal Investigators Discover Improprieties in Medicaid Work Requirement Spending
My father, a professor, used to always say the most interesting part of a paper can often be found in the footnotes. And a recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on administrative spending in Medicaid Section 1115 work requirement waivers support his claim. I recently read every word of the report, including all…
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Medicaid Critics Misconstrue Payment Error Rate Measurement to Undermine Popular Program
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) recently released new numbers on estimated improper payment rates in Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP. It will take some time to fully digest the 300+ page financial report and its findings, but in the meantime, it may be worth a quick refresher on the Payment Error Rate Measurement (PERM)…
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The CMS Administrator Talks to Medicaid Directors About Humility in Government
Two years ago, CMS Administrator Seema Verma gave a major policy address to the National Association of Medicaid Directors (NAMD) at which she outlined her agenda for Medicaid. She invoked Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson on the moral imperative of meeting the needs of the poor. She promised to give states more flexibility by, among other…
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New Resource from Legal Experts about Access to Health Insurance
Earlier this month, the experts at CLASP, NILC and NHeLP teamed up and released a new resource, 10 Facts About Access to Health Insurance for Immigrants and their Families, breaking down the barrage of anti-immigrant polices in just 2, easily understood pages. This resource comes just in time for open enrollment – for ACA Marketplace…
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States that Expanded Medicaid are Helping to Protect Children from Becoming Uninsured
Our annual report on the state of children’s coverage is out. It’s a deep dive into a disturbing trend – children across the country are losing affordable health coverage, rolling back gains started with the Affordable Care Act. One main cause of this drop in coverage is easily fixed. The 14 states that haven’t expanded…
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Renewing Bipartisan Commitment to Help Uninsured Children Should be Top Priority
Today we released our ninth annual report that tracks children’s health insurance coverage at the state and national level. This report looks at two-year trends from 2016 to 2018 analyzing American Community Survey data from the Census Bureau. We believe this is the first national report to look at this two-year time period, a time…
