The Search For A National Child Health Coverage Policy
By Sara Rosenbaum and Genevieve M. Kenney
Health Affairs, December 2014
Abstract
Thirty-eight percent of US children depend on publicly financed health insurance, reflecting both its expansion and the steady erosion of employment-based coverage. Continued funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) is an immediate priority. But broader reforms aimed at improving the quality of coverage for all insured children, with a special emphasis on children living in low-income families, are also essential. This means addressing the “family glitch,” which bars premium subsidies for children whose parents have access to affordable self-only employer-sponsored benefits. It also means addressing the quality of health plans sold in the individual and small-group markets—whether or not purchased through the state and federal exchanges—that are governed by the “essential health benefit” standard of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In this article we examine trends in coverage and the role of Medicaid and CHIP. We also consider how the ACA has shaped child health financing, and we discuss critical issues in the broader insurance market and the need to ensure plan quality, including the scope of coverage, use of a pediatric medical necessity standard that emphasizes growth and development, the structure of pediatric provider networks, and attention to the quality of pediatric health care.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/33/12/2125.abstract
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The ACA’s Pediatric Essential Health Benefit Has Resulted In A State-By-State Patchwork Of Coverage With Exclusions
By Aimee M. Grace, Kathleen G. Noonan, Tina L. Cheng, Dorothy Miller, Brittany Verga, David Rubin and Sara Rosenbaum
Health Affairs, December 2014
Abstract
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) establishes essential health benefits as the coverage standard for health plans sold in the individual and small-group markets for all fifty states and the District of Columbia, including the health insurance Marketplaces. “Pediatric services” is one of the required classes of coverage under the ACA. However, other than oral health and vision care, neither the act nor the regulations for implementing it define what these services should be. We investigated how state benchmark plans—the base plan chosen in each state as the standard or benchmark of coverage in that state under ACA rules—address pediatric coverage in plans governed by the essential health benefits standard. Our review of summaries of all the state benchmark plans found that no state specified a distinct pediatric services benefit class. Furthermore, although benchmark plans explicitly included multiple pediatric conditions, many plans also specifically excluded services for children with special health care needs. The Department of Health and Human Services has made a commitment in the essential health benefits regulations to review its approach for the 2016 plan year. Thus, our findings have implications for future regulations regarding the essential health benefits standard for pediatric services.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/33/12/2136.abstract
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The Scheduled Squeeze On Children’s Programs: Tracking The Implications Of Projected Federal Spending Patterns
By C. Eugene Steuerle and Julia B. Isaacs
Health Affairs, December 2014
Abstract
Federal programs for children are under increasing budgetary pressure. According to current federal law or any budget alternative being offered by the president or congressional leaders, spending on children would decline as a share of the budget and of the national economy. This article summarizes past, current, and projected budgets for children’s programs. It traces significant historical expansions of means-tested programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; depicts fairly significant declines in more universal supports, such as the income tax exemption for dependents; and shows the future squeeze on children’s programs brought about by automatic growth in health, retirement, and tax subsidy programs, along with the failure of revenues to keep pace with the overall growth in spending. Federal programs for health care have been a mixed blessing for children: Medicaid has grown to be the largest federal support for children, but overall federal health care costs eat away at the share of the budgetary pie left for anything else.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/33/12/2214.abstract
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
During the health care reform process there seemed to be an attitude that we were already doing well in ensuring that the health care needs of children were being met. Employer-sponsored family coverage took care of middle- and upper-income children, Medicaid and SCHIP covered lower-income children, and community health centers and other safety-net institutions took care of children who were not covered by the other programs. The Affordable Care Act expanded assurances of coverage by providing income-based subsidies for plans offered through the exchanges. So what is the problem?
Having multiple sources of coverage with different eligibilities that change with continual changes in life circumstances – income levels, employment status of family income source, changes in geographical location, variations in community resources, citizenship status, etc. – results in instability of coverage for everyone, certainly including children. These articles from the current Health Affairs summarize some of these variations in the public and private programs, variations in benefits covered, and variations in financing of the programs. The current situation might be summed up as lacking “a national child health coverage policy” (Rosenbaum and Kenney).
Although many factors contribute to the deficiencies in child health coverage, one of the more important is that we continue to try to build upon a fragmented combination of public and private programs, an approach that only perpetuates many of these deficiencies. An example is the “family glitch” in which children do not have access to exchange subsidies if the employed parent receives solo coverage through their work. Efforts to patch the various flaws only increase the complexity and administrative burden of our dysfunctional system, and yet patches on a fundamentally flawed infrastructure can never provide the stability that we need.
So what can we do? We can build a new health care financing infrastructure that serves well the needs of not only our children, but all of us. That would be a single payer national health program – an improved Medicare for all – but not just a Medicare that serves only the elderly and persons with disabilities, rather, like Canada, a Medicare that serves all of us. Our children deserve it, and so do we.