Medicaid
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“Healthy Students” Initiative Seeks to Help Children Achieve Better Health & Academic Success
Health care coverage helps children show up for school ready to learn and provides parents with the peace of mind of knowing they can afford to get their children the care they need to succeed. Sadly, many of America’s children are going without affordable coverage even though they are eligible for Medicaid or CHIP but…
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Little Known Provision Keeps Kids From Slipping Through Cracks Due to Differences in Eligibility Rules
For the most part, the Affordable Care Act aligns the way that Medicaid determines eligibility based on the same Modified Adjusted Gross Income (MAGI) rules used to determine eligibility for financial assistance in the Marketplace. But there are exceptions in Medicaid as I outlined in this blog. The differences can mean that an individual is…
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Medicaid and CHIP Eligibility, Enrollment, Renewal, and Cost-Sharing Policies as of January 2016: Findings from a 50-State Survey
Executive Summary January 2016 marks the end of the second full year of implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) key coverage provisions. This 14th annual 50-state survey of Medicaid and CHIP eligibility, enrollment, renewal, and cost-sharing policies provides a point-in-time snapshot of policies as of January 2016 and identifies changes in policies that occurred…
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Survey Shows States Made Significant Progress Implementing Data-Driven Eligibility in Medicaid
Eligibility decisions made in real-time or overnight when someone submits a Medicaid application? Automated determinations of ongoing eligibility at renewal without requiring enrollees to fill out forms or send in paperwork? It wasn’t too long ago that many Medicaid stakeholders would have thought those were pie-in-the sky notions. Yet, thanks to new high-performing eligibility systems…
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Children’s Health Coverage in Arizona: How Are Children Doing Without KidsCare?
Arizona, with its large number of uninsured residents, was primed to make major progress in 2014 with the full implementation of the Affordable Care Act. With the adoption of the Medicaid expansion, the state did see coverage improvements that mirrored national trends. Yet the state’s decision to dismantle KidsCare meant some Arizona children likely fell…
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Many Working Parents and Families in Virginia Would Benefit from Medicaid Coverage
Virginia is one of the 20 states that has elected not to accept federal funding under the ACA to extend Medicaid coverage to parents and other low-income adults. Consequently, parents in Virginia are not eligible for Medicaid or premium tax credits if their incomes exceed approximately 45 percent of the poverty line (45 percent of poverty is…
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NEACH Summit Highlights Continuous Battle for Health Care Access and Coverage for Children
By Ben Koller, Community Catalyst Last month, children’s health advocates and experts from around New England gathered for the New England Alliance for Children’s Health’s (NEACH) annual Children’s Health Care Summit. NEACH, an initiative of Community Catalyst, is a broad-based coalition of health advocates, providers, and legal experts dedicated to improving children’s access to high-quality,…
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Permanent 90/10 Rule Will Help States Continue Efforts to Modernize IT Systems
Although final publication of the 90/10 rule – providing generous, enhanced federal funding for Medicaid eligibility and enrollment systems – doesn’t quite bring the surprise of opening an unexpected holiday gift, it is still gives us many reasons to celebrate. If CMS had allowed the enhanced funding to expire as initially planned, states would have…
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Premium Assistance and Wrapped Benefits Part 2: A Startling Discovery
As I blogged about last week, our recent report with co-authors at the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured looked at wrapped benefits and how they are working in selected Section 1906 premium assistance programs. The most startling discovery to me was the finding that families have no cost-sharing protections in the programs we…
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Senate reconciliation bill repeals key children’s health provisions
So despite a bipartisan CHIP extension earlier this year, it appears that children’s coverage is not as popular as we may have thought. In fact, if the reconciliation bill as passed becomes law there is a good reason to believe that millions of children would become uninsured; almost assuredly the historic and steady reductions in the…
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Medicaid Premium Assistance Programs: What Information is Available About Benefit and Cost-Sharing Wrap-Around Coverage?
States have long used Medicaid funds as premium assistance to purchase private health insurance for beneficiaries as an alternative to providing coverage directly through the state Medicaid program. States using premium assistance generally must provide wrap-around benefits and cost-sharing protections so that Medicaid beneficiaries receiving private coverage will not have access to fewer benefits or…
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Premium Assistance and Wrapped Benefits: Do They Work?
Author’s note: This is the first in a two (or possibly three) part blog series – the next installment will ponder this question with a particular eye to the future of children’s coverage… Along with co-authors MaryBeth Musumeci and Robin Rudowitz at the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, Sean Miskell and I undertook…
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Arkansas and Arizona Drive in Different Directions on Medicaid Transportation Benefit
By Sean Miskell Most observers expect that remaining states that have not yet expanded Medicaid are likely to seek changes to the program via waivers as they move forward on expansion. A few states that have already expanded Medicaid are also seeking to make changes through waivers. But these changes are not always for the…
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Comments Submitted On Texas Medicaid Waiver
Georgetown CCF, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and seven other national organizations submitted a letter to CMS for public comment on Texas’ proposal to extend its Section 1115 Medicaid demonstration project, the Texas Healthcare Transformation and Quality Improvement Program. The full comments that were submitted November 16, 2015 can be found here –…
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$32 Million Now Available to Help Reach Eligible but Unenrolled Kids
Most uninsured children are eligible for Medicaid or CHIP but are not yet enrolled so finding them and helping them enroll is critical to successfully reducing the uninsured rate for children. As my colleague Tricia Brooks has pointed out many times, it is no secret that sustained outreach and enrollment support is the key to…
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Medicaid Expansion Would Help More Latino Families Succeed
By Steven Lopez, National Council of La Raza Latinos are the most uninsured population in the country. As the largest civil rights and advocacy organization in the nation, the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) works to improve the lives of Hispanic Americans, no matter who they are, where they live, or how much they…
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More Evidence that Medicaid Expansion Helps State Budgets
Recently, Kaiser Family Foundation released a report on Medicaid Enrollment & Spending Growth for FY 2015 and 2016. There is a lot of interesting data in the report, but the stand out finding confirms what we already know: Medicaid expansion is good for state budgets and leads to increases in coverage. Medicaid Enrollment is up…
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While NC’s Governor Reverses Course on Medicaid Expansion, Some Conservative State Executives Move Ahead
In this excerpt of an interview late last week with WRAL-TV anchor David Crabtree, NC Governor Pat McCrory, when asked about Medicaid, said that expansion would now have to wait at least three years for health reforms to take place in the state. McCrory also highlighted an Oval Office meeting he and several other Governors had…
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Targeted Medicaid Enrollment Reaches More Kids
By Suzanne Wikle, CLASP The rate of children without health insurance has hit an all-time low of 6 percent, according to a new report from the Center for Children and Families. The drop is largely attributable to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and to states’ efforts to increase enrollment. States that have opted to expand Medicaid…
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Medicaid Expansion: Important Factor in Declining Uninsurance Rates for Children
Our report released last week (Children’s Health Insurance Rates in 2014: ACA Results in Significant Improvements) contained good news for people who share the belief that no child should ever be uninsured in our country – the national child uninsurance rate is now at a historic low of 6 percent. Kids haven’t quite caught up…