Medicaid

This fact sheet provides an overview of the Healthy Indiana Plan, Indiana’s 1115 waiver demonstration project, and how it relates to the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion.

To help states launch the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansion and efficiently enroll eligible individuals, CMS has offered states a series of facilitated enrollment options. These options include strategies, referred to as “fast track enrollment” in this issue brief, that allow states to enroll eligible individuals into coverage using data already available from their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance programs (SNAP) and/or their Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) programs for children. This issue brief provides an overview of the new “fast track” enrollment options, including how they have been implemented, their impacts, and key lessons learned. It is based on a series of interviews with state officials in Arkansas, Illinois, Oregon and West Virginia conducted by Manatt Health Solutions and the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured in October 2013.

Community health centers are a key source of primary care in underserved areas. Their role will grow as coverage expands under the ACA. To sharpen understanding of the health center patient population, this brief compares them to the low-income population overall, using the Health Center Patient Survey and National Health Interview Survey. The pre-ACA profile of health center patients that emerges sets the stage for measuring change and highlights important implications of states’ Medicaid expansion decisions.

This analysis provides the first national estimates of the expected impact of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) coverage expansions on people with HIV. The brief finds that close to 70,000 uninsured people with HIV who are in care could gain new coverage, including 47,000 through Medicaid were all states to expand their Medicaid coverage.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) expansion of Medicaid to adults with incomes at or below 138% of the federal poverty level (FPL) effectively became a state option following the Supreme Court decision, creating a “coverage gap” for many poor uninsured adults in states that do not expand Medicaid. This brief examines the coverage gap by race and ethnicity.

This brief provides an overview of the many different paths to enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP, including paths created under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and reviews the available national level data on enrollment through these avenues.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently established 12 new Medicaid and CHIP eligibility and enrollment performance indicators for states to report beginning in October 2013. These indicators provide insight into the performance of new eligibility and enrollment policies established under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In December 2013, CMS released initial reports for a subset of the indicators. This brief provides an overview of the new performance indicators; the initial data; and the opportunities and challenges associated with reporting, analyzing, and interpreting the data.

To learn more about the early ACA enrollment experience in two states, the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured and PerryUndem Research and Communication conducted focus groups in Baltimore, Maryland and Reno, Nevada in November 2013 with low- and moderate-income individuals who recently applied for health insurance and consumer assisters trained to help individuals enroll. This study builds on previous work that examined preparations for open enrollment in several states, including Maryland and Nevada, which are both moving forward with the ACA’s Medicaid expansion to low-income adults and have established their own State-based Marketplace (SBM). The focus group discussions included adults who had successfully applied as well as consumer assisters.This brief provides key findings about the early ACA enrollment experience in Baltimore, Maryland and Reno, Nevada based on focus group discussions with these recent applicants and enrollment assisters.

This Data Snapshot provides 50-state data on Medicaid monthly enrollment trends, adding June 2013 data. Overall, Medicaid enrollment growth continued to slow to the lowest rate since the start of the Great Recession as the economic conditions continued to slowly improve. While enrollment growth rates have been trending downward as economic conditions continue to slowly improve, enrollment growth is expected to increase significantly as states implement the ACA. Regardless of whether states decide to implement the Medicaid expansion or not, enrollment is anticipated to grow on average across all states due to new streamlined eligibility and enrollment processes as well as outreach for new coverage. This report provides baseline data for understanding the impact of the ACA eligibility and enrollment policies on enrollment growth across states.

This issue brief walks through data recently released from Health and Human Services (HHS) and what it can and cannot tell us about the number of people that have applied for Medicaid since open enrollment for health insurance marketplaces began, how many have enrolled, and what the role of the ACA is in recent Medicaid coverage gains.