Medicaid
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Medicaid is Critical for Young Children and Their Parents – Time to Tackle Real Barriers to Work Like Affordable Child Care
Last month, I blogged about a helpful new 50-state report by our friends at the Urban Institute that breaks down coverage for children 3 and under and their parents. This week they released an update to this report with 2016 data and even looked at metro area coverage for young children. The upshot? Again,…
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Want to Reduce your State’s Infant Mortality Rate? Try Expanding Medicaid
Evidence continues to build on the benefits of the ACA’s Medicaid expansion for adults: improving health coverage and access, promoting family economic security, and creating peace of mind for the whole family (including, and especially, children). And here’s another study for the maternal and child health community: A new study published online last week in the American Journal…
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Weaponizing Medicaid Paperwork
It turns out that CMS has a “Patients Over Paperwork” initiative, which the agency describes as “our effort to reduce administrative burden and improve the customer experience while putting patients first.” Who knew? If you’ve been following Administrator Verma’s crusade to condition Medicaid coverage on meeting requirements to document work, you would be quite surprised.…
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What Does a Government Shutdown Mean for Medicaid and CHIP?
[Editor’s Note: If you reached this post while searching for information on how the current partial government shutdown is impacting health coverage, please read this new blog by Andy Schneider.] Even if you weren’t glued to CSPAN 2 on Friday night, you now know about the federal government shutdown. Many articles have been written about…
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Child Core Set of Health Care Quality Measures in Medicaid and CHIP
Georgetown CCF’s Tricia Brooks covered the Child Core Set of Health Care Quality Measurement and Reporting, a set of standardized, evidence-based measures to assess the quality of care children receive in Medicaid and CHIP. Below is the webinar, and here is the link for the slide deck.
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Research Update: How Medicaid Coverage for Parents Benefits Children
This week, I am reading studies about the links between health coverage for parents and children. We are closely following new guidance from CMS on a Medicaid work requirement. Yesterday, Joan Alker explained how a work requirement will lead to coverage losses for parents and harm children. Indeed, the evidence is strong that Medicaid coverage…
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Trump Administration’s New Medicaid Work Requirement Policy Will Harm Families
Today the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued guidance that radically alters Medicaid by allowing states to link Medicaid eligibility with work requirements. Essentially, the Secretary of Health and Human Services will allow states, using Section 1115 Medicaid demonstration waivers, to condition Medicaid eligibility on compliance with state-determined policies that require non-disabled adults…
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Wisconsin’s Partial Medicaid Expansion Covers Far Fewer People at Much Greater Cost
Among the 19 states that have yet to expand Medicaid to all adults up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, Wisconsin is the only one that covers all adults that are below the poverty level. It’s a policy choice that compares favorably to the 18 other “non-expansion” states; however, Wisconsin’s partial expansion covers…
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Research Update: Health Care Expenses from Families’ Budgets to Federal Budgets
This week, I am reading studies on how health coverage eases financial pressures on families’ budgets and how children fare in federal expenditures. Commonwealth Fund’s What’s at Stake: States’ Progress on Health Coverage and Access to Care, 2013–2016 This brief examines the progress made since the ACA, including increases in health coverage for children and…
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The Tax Bill: Bad News for Marketplaces and Medicaid
The tax bill (H.R. 1, The “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”) that Congress passed this week is about more than cutting taxes for corporations and high-income individuals, although it is definitely about that. It’s also about cutting health coverage for low-income children and families. The bill’s repeal of the tax penalty for not having health…
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New 50-state Report: Medicaid/CHIP Crucial for Infants and Toddlers and Their Parents
As we wait with bated breath to see whether Congress will pass a long-term CHIP funding extension before the holidays, a timely new report serves as a good reminder of importance of Medicaid and CHIP for our nation’s youngest children and their parents—and the very real possibilities that the gifts of this coverage could be taken…
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Michigan Medicaid Evaluation Has Important Lessons for States Considering Work Requirements
On Monday, a team of researchers from the University of Michigan (who are the official evaluators of the Healthy Michigan Plan) published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on the employment status of the adult Medicaid expansion population in Michigan. In a survey of 4,090 expansion adults, researchers found that…
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Tracking Medicaid Work Requirement Proposals
We here at Georgetown University CCF are closely tracking Medicaid Section 1115 demonstration waiver proposals as states attempt to create new barriers to coverage. There are many troubling proposals pending, but one of the most common is the imposition of a work or community service requirement as a condition of Medicaid coverage. As a reference,…
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Research Update: Checking Up on Health Care Utilization and Providers After the ACA’s Medicaid Expansion
This week, I am checking up on Medicaid research regarding health care utilization and providers. There is evidence that the expansion increased access and utilization of health care, led to an increase in smoking cessation, and increased the share of patients that physicians saw covered through Medicaid. Health Services Research’s Impact of Recent Medicaid Expansions…
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Research: Medicaid Expansions Help Parents, Children and Families Get Coverage, Afford Care, Reduce Debt
Recently Seema Verma, the Trump Administration’s director of Medicare and Medicaid, said that Medicaid provides “a card without care.” This line echoes state critics of Medicaid like Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin who recently said: “One of the most remarkable lies that has perpetrated in recent years in the healthcare community in America is that expanded…
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Medicaid and Work: How the CMS Administrator Has it Completely Upside Down
Work has a lot going for it. It allows people to support themselves and their families, it is a source of self-esteem, and — in a safe and non-predatory workplace — it is good for one’s health and well-being. In fact, encouraging work is one of the reasons that the Medicaid program is so important…
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Kansas and Mississippi Medicaid Waivers Race to the Bottom: Most Vulnerable Families Targeted by Harmful Proposal
Medicaid is a critical part of health insurance coverage in the US, covering millions of children and their parents, seniors and individuals with disabilities. More than half of states have taken the Affordable Care Act option to expand Medicaid coverage to more low-income parents and childless adults. But some states are trying to move in…
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Want kids to get preventive health care? Make sure their parents have health coverage.
If we’ve learned anything this year, it’s that we can’t take success covering children for granted. A lapse in CHIP funding (ahem!) or cuts to Medicaid could easily put our nation back in a place where rates of uninsured kids reverse course. But even as we work to keep the coverage we have, we also…
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This Thanksgiving I Am Grateful For My Child’s Health Insurance
It has been a long year here in Washington with many threats, twists, and turns for those who rely on publicly funded health coverage for their families – that is 40 percent of all children in the United States. In my role here at the Center for Children and Families, I often speak with reporters…
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Turning Back the Clock on Medicaid Would Undo Progress Nation Has Achieved in Reducing Uninsured Rate
Last week, CMS Administrator Seema Verma gave a major policy address to the National Association of Medicaid Directors. She made two things crystal clear. First, she cares about protecting “deserving” Americans: “…our safety net should be stronger to ensure that no deserving Americans fall through the cracks.” Second, she does not believe that the Medicaid…
