WELCOME TO MEDICAID AWARENESS MONTH
April is Medicaid Awareness Month and throughout the month, we will be highlighting the importance that Medicaid plays in the lives of people with disabilities. Next week, we will be releasing our updated Medicaid social media toolkit. For more information about what we’re doing to highlight the Medicaid program, check out today’s news item.
As part of our partnership with Community Catalyst, we have a project which highlights opportunities for people with disabilities to get access to health coverage through Medicaid or the ACA marketplace. As part of this project, we have resources you need to help with outreach including graphics like the one below which highlight the benefits of Medicaid. These graphics are available in the Community Catalyst Outreach Hub.
One major change coming to the Medicaid program is the end of the continuous coverage requirement which was put in place at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic due to the ongoing public health emergency. The continuous coverage requirement required states to maintain coverage of everyone on their Medicaid program without conducting redeterminations. Recently, CMS released guidance to the states on how they can start the process of conducting these redeterminations.
If you want to read more about this, the Georgetown University Center on Health Insurance Reforms (CHIR) and the Center for Children and Families released a new issue brief on the potential ramifications of the massive redetermination effort being undertaken. You can read more about it in the CHIR blog post.
A recent blog post by the National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP) also examines what some states are starting to do to prepare for the end of the continuous coverage requirement.
Another recent blog post by NASHP highlights what will happen at the end of this year if the enhanced tax credits made available by the American Rescue Plan Act expire at the end of the year as they are currently scheduled to do.
Previously, we reported that CMS had announced a new Special Enrollment Period (SEP) for individuals with low income. This SEP applies to those who are at or below 150% of the federal poverty level. Initially, this new SEP was not directly available through the healthcare marketplace, but now individuals can apply for this SEP directly through healthcare.gov. To learn more, check out this tip sheet released by CMS at the end of March.
This month, we’ve been running a series of live interviews with members of the disability community to learn how they make the most of their insurance coverage. The series has covered a variety of topics as follows:
- March 9: Rehabilitation/Habilitation Benefits
- March 16: Mental Health
- March 23: Medical Devices
- March 30: Access to Specialists
You can join our conversation this Wednesday afternoon, April 6th as we continue to discuss how to access care and get the most out of your insurance. You can access this live stream through our Facebook page or YouTube channel. For the full list of upcoming topics as well as dates/times, check out our news item.
Last week, we celebrated the 12-year anniversary of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) being signed into law. To celebrate the anniversary, we released a new blog post which highlights what the ACA means for people with disabilities.
In prior newsletters, we have been highlighting the blog post from the Georgetown University Center on Health Insurance Reforms (CHIR) on the public comments to CMS’s proposed Notice of Benefit and Payment Parameters for 2023. Yesterday, they added a new blog post looking at what stakeholders had to say about health equity in the NBPP comments.
Archives of our weekly updates are available on the NDNRC website.