Medicaid

This fact sheet discusses the role played by the enhanced federal Medicaid matching funds available to states through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), and the implications for state Medicaid programs as that extra assistance expires June 30, 2011. States used the ARRA enhanced Medicaid funding to…

Remember the “government takeover of the health care system” argument that critics of the health reform law have used?  Well, last week the Office of the Actuary in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services published the latest projections of health spending in the journal Health Affairs.  Attention focused mainly…

The adoption of new eligibility and enrollment requirements under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) provides states and the federal government an important opportunity to implement a meaningful set of performance measures for eligibility and enrollment systems. Performance measures could be used at the federal level to assess state performance in…

With the Supreme Court preparing to hear oral arguments about challenges to the 2010 Affordable Care Act in March 2012, this Kaiser Family Foundation brief serves as a primer on the pending case, which challenges the constitutionality both of the law’s individual mandate that requires most Americans to obtain health…

Despite tight budgets, nearly all states maintained or made targeted expansions or improvements in their Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Programs (CHIP) eligibility and enrollment rules in 2010, preserving the programs’ important role of providing coverage to millions of low-income Americans who otherwise lack affordable options. This stability in large…

This brief provides key information about the new option for state Medicaid programs to provide “health home” services for enrollees with chronic conditions. The option, established under the new health reform law, took effect on Jan. 1, 2011. Health homes are designed to facilitate access to and coordination of the…

This fact sheet examines how the recent recession drove up Medicaid enrollment as millions of Americans lost jobs and income, and how that increase in enrollment has been the primary cause of the increase in overall Medicaid spending. Fact Sheet (.pdf)

This fact sheet examines Medicaid’s role for Hispanic Americans. It includes data on Medicaid’s coverage of Hispanic Americans and the program’s impact on their access to care, as well as the impacts of the recent recession and the coming expansion of Medicaid under health reform on enrollment in Medicaid among…

Most Americans oppose the idea of converting Medicaid to block grant financing to reduce the federal deficit, and more than half want to see no reductions at all in Medicaid spending. One in five adults has received Medicaid benefits over time, and for most, experiences were positive, although one third…

This issue brief provides an overview of California’s “Bridge to Reform” Medicaid Demonstration Waiver, which was approved in 2010 and will make up to roughly $8 billion in federal Medicaid matching funds available to California over a five-year period to expand coverage to low-income uninsured adults and preserve and improve…