How Many Americans Are Enrolled In Medicaid
As of September 2020, there were 77.3 million people enrolled in Medicaid and Childrens Health Insurance Program coverage in the United States. Most are enrolled in Medicaid, although 6.7 million are enrolled in separate CHIP coverage. Including separate CHIP and Medicaid, children account for about half of the 77 million enrollees .
Newsworking Poor In Idaho Face Crushing Medical Debt And Health Care Politics
Instead, Smith committed the funding to other social service programs mental health, addiction programs, school transportation and the state’s public defenders’ office, among others insisting that the state had to choose his priorities or expansion.
Experts said it was a false choice, citing the state’s higher-than-expected revenue and the additional Covid-19 relief it will soon get from the federal government, including $2.5 billion in general aid and the $1 billion it will receive if it follows through with Medicaid expansion.
“We’ve got significant resources available to support implementation of expansion,” said Amy Blouin, the president and CEO of the Missouri Budget Project, a nonprofit that analyzes the state’s budget and policy priorities. “We also know, because time and again other states have shown us, that Medicaid expansion results in state budget savings and increased tax revenue because of jobs it creates in the health care industry.”
Advocates, lawmakers and other Missourians said they feel they have been hung out to dry as they watch for Republican political maneuvering in the state capital in the coming weeks.
What Does The Obamacare Supreme Court Ruling Really Mean
The Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act in 2012, but it gave the states the choice to opt out of Medicaid expansion. It is now rests with governors and state legislatures to decide whether it is in the best interest of the state to implement the Medicaid portion of the law that affords health coverage to those in need.
If a state chooses not to expand the program, the federal government cannot take away the Medicaid funds a state already receives. So while states have the carrot of extra Medicaid funding if they take up the expansion, they dont have the stick of losing federal funding if they do not take it. This ability to opt out of the expansion but suffer no serious consequences undermines the laws ability to ensure that millions of low-income Americans benefit from the expansion of Medicaid coverage. This caveat in the Courts decision opened the door to allow governors to deny an essential aspect of health care reform. Unfortunately, states opting out of Medicaid expansion do so to the detriment of their residents, as well as their state budget.
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What Is The Mandate For Medicare Expansion
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is pushing to expand Medicare without a plan to pay for the promises the … program has already made.
One of the most controversial provisions in the Build Back Better reconciliation bill working its way through Congress is an expansion of Medicare benefits championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders . Sanders has said that expanding benefits to include coverage for dental, hearing, and vision services at no additional cost to beneficiaries is not negotiable for him. But the reality is that the senator from Vermont has no political mandate to demand this costly policy right now. As lawmakers work to trim the bills overall size so it can pass Congress, they should prioritize more-pressing public investments from President Bidens agenda now and pursue a comprehensive plan to strengthen Medicare in the future.
Whats The Latest On The Medicare For All Act
Asit stands, the Medicare for All act has received strong support and oppositionfrom all sides.
Proponents for the Medicare for All Act believe healthcare coverage for all individuals is a human right. They point out that every major country in the world can guarantee healthcare to all while showing better health outcomes and keeping the cost substantially less per capita than we do in the U.S. Stating that the current healthcare system in America is outdated compared to the coverage that is offered in other major countries around the world, they believe we can do better.
Proponents against the Medicare for All Act believe that universal coverage is far too costly and that even an increase in taxes would not fully cover the proposed costs. They also suggest that the quality of care beneficiaries currently receive would be greatly diminished under a universal, single-payer system, especially for individuals with certain conditions.
The current COVID-19 pandemic has also sparked a passionate debate as to how a single-payer healthcare system could impact worldwide disease outbreaks once they reach America.
Many people have made comparisons to how other countries have been able to tackle the pandemic with single-payer healthcare systems. However, it is impossible to know exactly how Medicare for All would impact a scenario such as pandemic socially, financially, or otherwise.
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Who Is And Who Isnt Gaining Coverage Under Medicaid Expansion
Medicaid, jointly funded by the state and the federal government, requires coverage for certain groups of individuals: low-income children and some of their parents poor pregnant woman certain low-income seniors and some individuals with disabilities who are under the age of 65. Under the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid eligibility will be extended to all individuals with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level beginning in 2014$26,347 for a family of three and $15,417 for an individual.
How Would Medicare For All Work
Thecurrent proposal for Medicare for All would consist of a Medicareexpansion. Currently, Medicare only covers Americans aged 65 and older, as wellas those with certain chronic health conditions. Medicare beneficiaries arecurrently covered for:
- Medicare Part A, which covers inpatient and outpatient hospital services, home health care, nursing facility care, and hospice care
- Medicare Part B, which covers preventative care, diagnostic services, and treatment services for medical conditions
- Medicare Part D, which helps cover prescription drug costs
Underthe current proposal, Medicare for All would expand Medicare to include allnecessary health services, such as:
- inpatient services
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What Are The Alternatives To Medicare For All
Not everyone believes in the viability and success of a single-payer healthcare system like Medicare for All. Joe Bidens alternative to Medicare for All includes an expansion of the Affordable Care Act that was enacted under President Obama in 2010. These changes would not impact Medicare beneficiaries in the same way that Medicare for All would.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or simply the Affordable Care Act , often referred to as Obamacare, was designed to create affordable healthcare options for more Americans.
As an alternative to Medicare for All, the changes according to Joe Biden, to the ACA would include:
- more health insurance choices for all Americans
- lower premiums and extended coverage
- expanded coverage to include those with lower incomes
- increased affordable options for enrollees
- changes in billing practices and medical costs
- reduced drug costs and improved generic options
- expanded reproductive and mental health services
Accordingto a recentreview of the current literature, there are also two additional federal and20 state proposals for a single-payer healthcare system here in the UnitedStates.
Medicaid Expansion Helps Address Health Disparities
Extending health coverage to more low-income people is an important way to reduce health disparities between people of color and others in the United States. An analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the Medicaid expansion particularly affects people of color, given that they are more likely to lack health insurance and also to have low incomes. In states that have not adopted the Medicaid expansion, poor adults with incomes below the federal poverty level fall into a coverage gap because they remain ineligible for Medicaid but earn too little to qualify for premium tax credits for qualified health plans in the Marketplace. As a result, they are likely to remain uninsured. More than one-quarter of uninsured adults who would be eligible for Medicaid if all states expanded are people of color. The Kaiser analysis also found that the coverage gap in states not expanding Medicaid disproportionately impacts poor, uninsured African-American adults since they are likely to reside in the southern region of the country, where most states have not implemented the Medicaid expansion.
CMS is offering links/charts for informational purposes only, facts should not be construed as an endorsement of the organization’s programs or activities
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Who Qualifies And What Is The Income Eligibility
- Expanding Medicaid by changing enrollment requirements to the national floor of 138% FPL for ALL individuals children, pregnant women, parents, and childless adultsis a state voluntary option.
- The 133% FPL means an average $15, 800 for individual or $26,813 for family of three
- For the first time, childless, non-disabled adults under 65 years of age with income below 133% of the FPL, can receive Medicaid without requesting for a waiver
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An Rx For Rising Drug Prices
Letting Medicare negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies would help offset the costs from the expanded benefits. For the 2019 bill, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that negotiating prices would reduce federal spending by roughly $456 billion over a decade.
Proponents say the change could also help lower prescription drug costs for beneficiaries. “There’s just a really strong appetite among the public for policy-makers to do something about prescription drug prices,” says Juliette Cubanski, deputy director for the Kaiser Family Foundation ‘s Medicare policy program.
The current proposal from Democrats would allow Medicare to cap drug costs at 120% of the average price in six countries . But this would only happen if the government and the drug companies failed to agree on a lower price.
The negotiation process would only apply to single-source brand name drugs with no generic competitors or roughly 25 drugs in 2024 and 50 in later years. These would be selected from the 125 medications with the highest net Medicare Part D spending and the 125 with the highest net spending nationally.
Most medications will probably be unaffected, Cubanski says. Medicare doesn’t need to negotiate prices for every single drug because most are already inexpensive. Instead, the legislation is aimed at lowering costs for medications with no generic alternative. “They don’t have competition forces to keep that price in check,” she says.
Here’s Who The Program Will Cover Under The Health Care Law And How
A key feature of the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare, as it has come to be known is the expansion of Medicaid to millions of low-income Americans, many of them uninsured, beginning next year. This has been one of the most controversial parts of the new health care law, and some states are still deciding whether to take part in the expansion.
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The Medicaid expansion could help nearly 4 million uninsured adults ages 46 to 64 gain access to health care.
We’ve got answers to these frequently asked questions.What is Medicaid?Medicaid is a health insurance program for certain groups of low-income Americans: children and their parents, pregnant women, people 65 or older and people with disabilities. The federal government and each state share the cost of covering more than 60 million Americans about a fifth of the population.What is Medicaid expansion?Beginning in 2014, the health care law could bring up to 20 million additional people into the program, including many who have never had health insurance.
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Social Policy In Search Of A Problem
New taxpayer subsidies for the Medicare expansion would be targeted to Americans ages 60 to 64, or, under the Sanders proposal, those 55 to 64. As noted, this is an age cohort that enjoys a higher median household income than either younger working families or current Medicare beneficiaries.REF Not only would the proposal expand government dependency down the age scale, but it would also create a new constituency for government dependency further up the income scale.
Expanding Medicare Part Of The Sweeping Care Economy Bill Congressional Democrats Are Hammering Out Has Become A Sticking Point In Negotiations
Democrats are trying to reach a deal on reshaping Americas safety net, combating climate change and creating a fairer tax code. Expanding Medicare has become a point of contention in the intra-party negotiations and could be yet another measure that gets stripped from the final bill.
Centrist Democratic Senator Joe Manchin has stated that he wants to stabilize the program before there is any expansion. However, progressive members of the party are drawing a line in the sand demanding that the provisions set out in the bill must stay in order for there to be any deal.
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Hundreds Of Billions In Savings
Adding dental, hearing, and vision benefits to traditional Medicare through the reconciliation bill could make Medicare Advantage plans less attractive to consumers, cutting into private insurers profits. Such an expansion of the national insurance program would likely cost the federal government more than $350 billion over the next ten years.
However, a proposal to include those benefits in Medicare without increasing the rate at which the government reimburses Medicare Advantage plans could cut that cost by 41 percent, according to a recent analysis by Matthew Fiedler, an economist at the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy and former chief economist on President Barack Obamas Council of Economic Advisors. With corporate Democrats demanding a smaller reconciliation bill, such a drastic cost savings should, in theory, be a very attractive move.
Most of the federal savings from excluding the cost from the benchmark would be coming out of reduced plan profits, Fiedler told the Daily Poster.
More than 98 percent of Medicare Advantage plans already offer dental, vision, and hearing benefits. While some of those plans could be required to improve their dental, vision, and hearing benefits to meet the new proposed standards for traditional Medicare, and a few would be required to expand their coverage to include those benefits, the plans can afford to do so without the government increasing the benchmark, Fiedler explained.
How Is Medicaid Funded
Medicaid is funded jointly by the federal and state governments. For people eligible for Medicaid due to expansion of Medicaid under the ACA, the federal government pays 90 percent of the cost while the state pays 10 percent. But for everyone else in the Medicaid program, states pay a larger share of the cost. The exact funding split in each state is based on a federal medical assistance percentage thats determined based on the states average per capita income . In every state, its at least 50 percent, but it ranges to more than 70 percent in some states.
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Will Medicaid Expansion Help The Economy
When hundreds of thousands of individuals in a state are gaining health care coverage, there must also be thousands of health care professionals available to care for them. Likewise, there will be an increased demand for equipment for medical tests, the production of extra beds, more maintenance jobs at growing health care facilitiesthe list goes on. In short, Medicaid expansion is an engine for job creation.
According to the Health Policy Institute of Ohio, by 2015 Medicaid expansion will create at least 23,000 new Ohio jobs in health care and other related industries, increase the earnings of Ohio residents by at least $16.7 billion, and increase the states total economic activity by at least $18.6 billion from 2014 to 2022. In fact, costs to employers could total $876 million to $1.3 billion in the states that oppose, are leaning against, or remain undecided on expansion as the result of penalties for noncompliance with the Affordable Care Act.
The Importance Of The Medicaid Expansion
Since Medicaid expansion is voluntary, a state that chooses to expand Medicaid can opt-out at any given time. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 17 million individuals are expected to gain Medicaid/CHIP coverage due to the Medicaid Expansion, but an estimate 6 million people who are eligible for the expansion will not be covered because of resistance from state governments to participate in the expansion.
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Medicare Vs Medicaid Expansion
While many states have expanded their Medicaid programs, the process for doing the same with Medicare would be very different. Medicaid is government health insurance for those with low incomes, which the federal and state governments collectively manage.
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On the other hand, the federal government solely runs Medicare, so expansion would need to happen nationwide. Therefore, there must be majority support for the expansion of Medicare, and the bill must pass for it to be possible.
Medicaid Expansion: Frequently Asked Questions
States that have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act have dramatically lowered their uninsured rates. Meanwhile, those who gained coverage have grown healthier and more financially secure, while longstanding racial disparities in health outcomes, coverage, and access to care have shrunk.
The American Rescue Plan, which President Biden signed into law in March, includes a large new financial incentive for states to adopt the expansion, and that has prompted questions among policymakers in the non-expansion states about how expansion works. Here are the answers to some key questions.
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