Author: SCHIP troubled by high dropout rates
There’s a high dropout rate from State Children’s Health Insurance Programs (SCHIP) and Medicaid programs, said Benjamin Sommers, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, in a recent article in Health Affairs magazine. “Many policymakers and analysts have made a leap in assuming that the issue (of uninsured children) is primarily one of take-up (getting people to enroll),” Sommers writes. “Poor retention in public insurance as well as transient gaps in coverage might also be a driving factor in this problem.” He noted that 74 percent of all uninsured children in 2005 were already eligible for either SCHIP or Medicaid, but one-third of all uninsured children had lost Medicaid or SCHIP coverage the previous year.
New clinical model helps P4P reporting efforts
Cardinal Health, a Dublin, Ohio-based provider of healthcare products and services, says it has developed a more accurate methodology to report the quality of care provided by a hospital or healthcare providers. Researchers conducted a study across six major diseases showing that using clinical data more accurately accounts for the severity of an illness and leads to more clinically valid quality measurements than traditional methods. In the study, researchers from Cardinal Health, the Center for Outcomes Research at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine analyzed data from more than a million admissions to create models that are clinically sound and adequately adjusted for severity of illness.
Study: Young adults more likely to be uninsured
A rising number of adults 19-29 years old are uninsured, according to a recent report from the Commonwealth Fund. Researchers found that 13.3 million adults ages 19-29 were uninsured in 2005, up from 12.9 million in 2004. Despite comprising only 17 percent of the under-65 population, they account for 30 percent of the non-elderly uninsured, researchers found. Sixteen states have enacted legislation in the last four years requiring that insurance policies covering parents also cover their children beyond age 18 or 19. Extending eligibility for Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program beyond age 18, the authors say, would further expand coverage because a majority of uninsured young adults have low incomes.