The Shriver Brief : Poverty Law Commentary & Insights : Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law : Affordable Housing, Healthcare Reform

Women are the most likely to have the greatest contact with the health care system, as they often coordinate health care for themselves and their families. Yet women face unique barriers to obtaining and paying for health care. Nearly half of all low-income women are uninsured, and those who are insured are less likely to visit the doctor because of unaffordable out-of-pocket costs. However, things are changing for the better. Thanks to health care reform, low-income women now will face dramatically fewer cost barriers to access health care. The newly passed health care reform law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, will make health care more affordable, easier to obtain and provide more comprehensive services, ensuring women receive the care they need. 

Starting January 1, 2014, 8.2 million women whose incomes are at or below 133% of the federal poverty level will now be eligible for health coverage through the expansion of the Medicaid program. According to the National Women’s Law Center, up to 154,300 uninsured, low-income women in Illinois will gain health care coverage through the Medicaid expansion.  Another benefit, this coverage will be more comprehensive and include family planning and contraceptive services that are, without a doubt, a plus for women.

Moderate-income women and their families will also reap the benefits from health care reform with the creation of health insurance exchanges. Women with incomes up to 400% of federal poverty level can receive tax-credits that effectively lower out-of-pocket costs and help pay for health insurance coverage. Up to 7 million uninsured women nationwide and 471,000 women in Illinois will benefit from health insurance exchanges and tax-credits.

All women will benefit from the provision that requires all new individual and small business health plans to carry an “essential benefits package”, which provides coverage for essential services such as maternity care, prescription drug coverage, and mental health services.  Because of the difficulty women have finding these services in the individual market, this coverage marks a vital improvement in providing fundamental services women need.

Women stand to gain greatly from health care reform. In fact, women across socioeconomic levels have already started benefiting from health care reform. The National Women’s Law Center and the Commonwealth Fund have done extensive work to make clear what health care reform means for women. For more information on how health care reform benefits all women, read or subscribe to the latest issue of WomanView, entitled “30 Million Women Will Benefit from Health Care Reform.”

Heidy Robertson coauthored this article.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

This May, the Illinois Auditor General released an audit of the Covering All Kids Insurance Act expansion population of the All Kids program, Illinois’ comprehensive and affordable health insurance program for all uninsured children, which benefited over 1.67 million kids in 2009 and has garnered bi-partisan support in the state General Assembly over the last several years. The Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law recently released a brief examining the scope of the audit and the conclusions made by the Auditor General. Instead of providing helpful information to Illinois legislators and citizens on the program’s expenditures of money and awards of contracts, as directed by the law authorizing the audit, it overreaches into policy issues beyond its legislative authority and unwisely recommends changes to the All Kids program that, if implemented, would contradict health policy experts and jeopardize billions of federal Medicaid match dollars. 

The legislative purpose of the audit was to monitor expenditures of money and awards of contracts under the program, not to evaluate public policy. However, the Auditor General chose to focus the overwhelming majority of his attention on the public policy behind the Covering All Kids Insurance Act (to cover all children) and the carefully researched administrative policies regarding enrollment and retention in the program that have been adopted by the Department of Healthcare and Family Services (DHFS). It is unclear why the Auditor General assumes that the General Assembly was inviting an audit of its own public policy choices, and by doing so, second guesses the implementation choices made by DHFS experts on these matters. Moreover, the requirement of an annual audit for a subset of a state Medicaid program is unusual, administratively costly, and not supported by any data or legislative finding. The Covering All Kids Insurance Act—which provides coverage to less than 6% of the total All Kids population—was unjustifiably singled out for this scrutiny.

The Auditor General’s critique of Illinois’ use of passive renewal and 12-month continuous eligibility, and his other recommended changes to the enrollment procedures contradict national health policy experts and federal health leaders. If implemented, these recommendations could result in eligible kids being dropped from coverage, leaving them less likely to receive treatment for chronic conditions such as diabetes and asthma, and more likely to have poorer health, greater rates of avoidable hospitalizations, higher mortality rates, delays in necessary care, and unfilled prescriptions. At the same time, many of these recommendations, if implemented, could jeopardize federal Medicaid match money under the maintenance of efforts requirements of the stimulus law and federal health reform--at a loss of billions of dollars for Illinois.

The audit spends much time complaining about the lack of documentation in case files differentiating the types of immigrant children covered by the program, because, according to the audit, the correct documentation would entitle the state to federal matching funds that Illinois would otherwise forego. However, the difference in documentation among immigrant children did not become relevant to federal financing until Congress passed CHIPRA in January 2009 allowing federal matching funds for certain immigrant children for the first time. The Auditor General paid insufficient attention to the fact that DHFS can retroactively obtain the documentation needed to maximize and claim these federal funds for the time period in question. Similarly, the Auditor General failed to mention that the expansion population of the Covering All Kids Insurance Act has been entirely paid for by offsetting spending reductions elsewhere in the state’s medical assistance programs, as intended by the General Assembly when it passed the law.

Hard working Illinois families know far too well today’s economic reality and the importance of their children’s health insurance. We owe Illinois families a complete, accurate picture of the All Kids program, including a thoughtful real-world analysis of how over 1.6 million Illinois children and their families would be affected by implementation of the auditor’s recommendations. The full brief on the All Kids program is available on the Shriver Center's website.

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Throughout the debate on health care reform, the focus on changes for older Americans was largely prescription drugs and closing the drug coverage "doughnut hole." These changes are extremely important for many senior citizens who hit their drug coverage limit and are forced to pay high out-of-pocket costs. In fact, there is a $250 payment to seniors who reach the doughnut hole--a down payment until the eventual full elimination of the doughnut hole that will happen later this year.

However, the new law also includes several other provisions that will greatly assist older Americans, particularly low-income senior citizens, which the National Senior Citizens Law Center details in several recent reports.

• For older Americans who rely on long-term services, the new law will create financial incentives for states to shift Medicaid spending toward community-based services, including a six-percentage point increase in federal Medicaid reimbursement for community-based care initiatives.
• The law establishes several pilot programs to study and improve coordination of care for Americans who receive coverage through both Medicare and Medicaid, otherwise known as "dual eligibles."
• The law strengthens medical assistance programs to ensure beneficiaries promptly receive covered services.
  
• The law eliminated co-payments for prescription drugs for individuals receiving long-term care services in the home and in an institutional setting. Under current law, individuals living in an institutional setting do not have co-payments, while those receiving services in the home do have co-payments.
  
• For Americans who are too young to qualify for Medicare but who retire early, a temporary "reinsurance" program will reduce the cost burden on employers.
  

According to the National Senior Citizen Law Center, the most significant new provision in the new law is the extension of coverage for 32 million Americans, which includes millions of people aged 50-64, through a Medicaid expansion, new state-based Exchanges with subsidies for low- and middle-income Americans, and regulation of the worst practices of insurance companies. Finally, millions of low-income older Americans will have access to the care that they need, and important improvements will be made to programs that contribute to the health and well-being of older Americans.

Check out the NSCLC reports for details on how reform benefits older Americans!

Carrie Gilbert co-authored this post.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

I'm not a health care expert, just a spectator like most of America. It's been said that watching legislation being made is like watching sausage being made. Thanks to the 24-hour news cycle, blogs, etc., we've all just been treated to 14 months of the stomach-turning process of watching legislation being made. This may account for the less-than-jubilant reaction to the enactment of health care reform into law.

Make no mistake, however. This is real, lasting, fundamental, historic social change, on a par with the creation of Social Security in the 1930s and Medicare in the 1960s. It ends the national shame of more than 40 million people without health insurance. It creates a system where everyone must play and everyone has a stake.

Health care reform is not a traditional safety net program. You don't get a card. But we live in a much more complicated world than we did in the 1930s or the 1960s. This reform had to be a accomplished within the confines and constraints of two of the most powerful industries in America--the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance industry. Health care reform succeeded because it builds on the existing health care structure to accomplish at least nine extraordinary goals:

1. First and foremost, it creates a system of subsidies that will allow all people--adults, children, working, not working--to access affordable health insurance.
    
2. It will protect people from financial ruin if they contract a disabling disease.
    
3. It will prevent insurance companies from canceling insurance policies when the policyholder gets sick.
    
4. It will provide workers with job mobility since insurance companies will no longer be permitted to deny coverage based on a preexisting condition.
    
5. It will make insurance affordable for middle-income people through a system of subsidies.
    
6. It will provide very low-income single adults with access to Medicaid.
    
7. It will make it affordable for small businesses to provide health insurance to their workers.
    
8. The doughnut hole will be eliminated and seniors will be able to afford their prescriptions.
    
9. Young adults--an age group that is particularly likely to be uninsured--will be able to remain on their parents' insurance policies until they turn 26.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks