Public health insurance provides essential benefits to low-income families, including financial stability and access to other public benefits.
Recent SCHIP and Medicaid policy changes threaten to destabilize families. What are the equity implications of these policy shifts and how are funders reacting?
The Roundtable’s public health insurance work is done in partnership with:
Q&As
With contributions from Lisa Shapiro, Joe Weissfeld, Cheryl Parcham, & Justin Mendoza. One in five Americans and almost half of all children get their healthcare coverage through Medicaid. Public health insurance programs buoy families’ health and economic security, building opportunity for all. It is critical that these programs are strong and that they are as…
With contributions from Elisabeth Burak & Joan Alker What is the untapped potential of Medicaid? CHIP? Medicaid and CHIP are joint federal-state programs that serve more than one in three kids annually. Medicaid is by far the more important program of the two. States administer Medicaid with the federal government setting parameters and paying a…
With contributions from Rebecca Cokley, Director, Disability Justice Initiative Public health insurance programs are vast policies with many differences from state to state. It can be difficult to understand the effects of potential changes and why they are so critical for families. One group that is especially affected by changes to SCHIP and Medicaid are…
With contributions from Judy Solomon, Senior Fellow Medicaid coverage differs vastly from state to state and these differences matter to people’s health, economic security, and livelihood. When states gained the option to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act in 2014, it provided an excellent opportunity to study the impact of this policy by comparing…
With contributions from Samantha Artiga, Director, Disparities Policy Project The Kaiser Family Foundation focuses on national health issues through policy analysis, journalism, and communications. KFF serves as a non-partisan source of facts, analysis, and journalism for policymakers, the media, the health policy community, and the public. Let’s start with a high-level overview of Medicaid – its…
Funder Conversations
With contributions from Daniel Cohn. Mt. Sinai’s mission is to support organizations throughout Greater Cleveland that improve the health and well-being of the Jewish and general communities. The Foundation focuses on primary prevention and early intervention, especially protecting and improving the health of people from communities that have been historically marginalized. Like many health care…
With contributions from Amy Price. For decades, the Zellerbach Family Foundation (ZFF) has supported many efforts to improve the children’s mental health system. Notwithstanding some important progress, most of the efforts have chipped away at the edges of a fundamentally flawed system that is pathology-based, deeply fragmented, mired in bureaucracy and fails to acknowledge root…
With contributions from Kimberly McPherson & Abena Asante. St. David’s Foundation (SDF) invests in improving the health and well-being of residents in the five-county area around Austin, Texas. SDF has grown significantly during the last decade, enabling it to make larger and more significant investments in the local health infrastructure. During that period, a number…
With contributions from June Glover, Martha Davis, & Alexis Levy. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) is working alongside others to build a national Culture of Health that provides everyone in America a fair and just opportunity for health and well-being. We are working toward this vision by investing in four broad areas of focus:…
With contributions from Phyllis Meadows. The Kresge Foundation’s Health team has centered its work over the past few years on a set of strategic goals to address health inequities and persistent health disparities. Our underlying approaches place communities as the anchors in organizing how partnerships, policy, power and leadership can be enhanced to improve health…
With contributions from Ryan Barker. At the Missouri Foundation for Health (MFH), we focus on public health insurance through our Health Policy shop and two of our Strategic Initiatives (Advocacy and Medicaid Expansion). Our work encompasses research, grants, education, and contract work to achieve our goals of protecting, expanding, and enhancing the Medicaid and CHIP…
With contributions from Barbara Leonard, Jake Grindle, & Andrea Francis. Until recently, much of our advocacy funding was focused on a set of organizations working together to expand access to public health insurance programs, including Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace, but after our state’s successful Medicaid expansion and the relative stabilization of the…
With contributions from Katherine Beckmann. At The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Health subprogram strives to protect and advance health insurance coverage in addition to access to quality health care and early nutrition services for young children and families. To achieve these goals, we invest in federal and state advocacy, research and policy analysis,…
Wednesday, July 8 * 2:00-3:00 pm eastern The economic fallout from the COVID-19 crisis is projected to deeply impact state budgets for years. This likely means budget cuts. As Medicaid is a large portion of state budgets, it is one area likely to be affected, but how? What will state budget cuts mean for children…
Thursday, March 19 * 2:00 – 2:30 pm Eastern Does Medicaid have an impact on whether poor families can stay in their homes? What about on poverty rates? How has Medicaid expansion affected families experiencing poverty? Learn all of this and more with Naomi Zewde! Naomi is an Assistant Professor of health policy and…
Grantmakers in Health webinar November 21, 2019 Learn more and register here Join GIH for this webinar. Experiencing trauma in childhood increases the risk of chronic disease and behavioral health issues throughout life. The Medicaid program, which provides health coverage for approximately 40 percent of children and youth aged 0-18 in the United States, is…
Related News & Updates
This blog post from the Georgetown Center for Children and Families examines the ways schools provide critical health and nutrition supports for children and how the stimulus bills are trying to help families access these supports outside of schools. The post examines the stimulus bills’ effects on Medicaid, K-12 funding, students with disabilities, mental health…
This new research published in the journal Health Affairs looked at both physical and behavioral health outcomes to examine the impact of Medicaid expansion. For a review of the research on the impact of Medicaid expansion, check out this article from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Last week, CMS announced a new program – Healthy Adult Opportunity – that would allow states to opt into a new funding program for Medicaid that offers a spending cap or block grant. To better understand the new program, read this review by NPR or this one by The New York Times. Kaiser Health News also put together…
The State Health Access Data Assistance Center (SHADAC) put together this illustrative infographic on the pervasive racial and educational inequities in our healthcare system with a focus on access to a personal doctor and foregone medical care due to cost. In 2019, 25% of Americans said they or a family member delayed necessary medical care…
The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago has been exploring the personal financial impact of the ACA since its passage. Part of their ongoing research explores the bill’s impact in expansion states and non-expansion states. This summary provides an overview of ways that Medicaid expansion improved the financial health of low-income Americans.
This great interactive tool by the Kaiser Family Foundation provides facts for each state on coverage, expansion policies, types of services covered, and more.
This article from the Kaiser Family Foundation outlines the ten most critical facts to understand Medicaid. This is the perfect place to start if you are looking for a quick read to catch you up on how Medicaid is structured and what and who it covers (and doesn’t).
The Kaiser Family Foundation performed a review of over 300 research studies on the effects of Medicaid expansion. This literature review includes information on access to care, use of health care facilities, quality of care, health outcomes, affordability, and more. Expansion states saw increased health care coverage, improved measures of health care access, more positive…
The Urban Institute compiles research on the impacts of work requirements for safety net programs, including Medicaid, TANF, and SNAP. Here is a roundup of some of their work: Urban Institute compilation of research on work requirements Lessons for Medicaid from TANF and SNAP work requirements What happens when a state institutes Medicaid work requirements?…
Hospitals in rural America rely heavily on public support to stay open. Across the country, rural hospitals are facing closures. This news story highlights one effect of Medicaid expansion in rural communities – additional funding that keeps hospitals open and Americans from having to travel far distances for emergency or routine care.