Medicaid coverage crisis; the school bus blues; and LEGO's Braille breakthrough

Each week, we showcase a picture of real life from the Medical Motherhood community. Please send in your pictures! What do you want people to know about the #medicalmom life?

Thank you for all the kudos on the NPR story last week and welcome to those of you who are new subscribers! Your readership is appreciated.

Those of you who are local to the Portland area — or who want to check out the feed online — should tune in to OPB Radio this Tuesday at noon. Sometime during that hour, I’ll be speaking with host Dave Miller about the potential for Medicaid money in Oregon schools. We’ll also look at some of the local barriers that are still in place that could stymie federal efforts to get all kids on Medicaid access to medical and behavioral health care while at school.

Medical Motherhood’s news round up

Snippets of news and opinion from outlets around the world. Click the links for the full story.

• From CNN: “An ‘obscene’ number of kids are losing Medicaid coverage”

For months, Evangelina Hernandez watched helplessly as her autistic twin sons regressed – their screaming, biting and scratching worsening. The Wichita, Kansas, resident couldn’t afford the $3,000 monthly tab for their 10 prescriptions or their doctor visits without Medicaid.

The toddlers, along with three of their sisters, lost their health insurance in May, swept up in the state’s eligibility review of all its Medicaid enrollees. Hernandez said she only received the renewal packet a day before it was due and mailed it back right away. She also called KanCare, the state’s Medicaid program, and filled out another application over the phone, certain that the kids remained eligible.

Yet, every time she inquired about the children’s coverage, she was told the renewal was still being processed. And though her partner works for an airplane manufacturer, the family can’t afford the health insurance plan offered by his employer.

“My kids are suffering. You can see it,” said Hernandez, who along with her infant daughter, remained on Medicaid thanks to coverage provisions for low-income, postpartum mothers and babies. “The medication they’re on, I can’t afford it.”

Just over a week ago, Hernandez got the call she had been waiting for: The kids’ coverage was reinstated. However, the pharmacy told her it could not immediately fill her sons’ prescriptions because it had to get their new enrollee information – and even then, she could only pick up the medication for one son because there were errors in her other son’s file.

The delays have consequences. Once they start taking the medications again, it will take about a month before their behavior starts to improve, she said.

All across the US, hundreds of thousands of children are being kicked off of Medicaid, even though experts say the vast majority continue to qualify. They are among the more than 87 million people in Medicaid and several million more in the Children’s Health Insurance Program who are having their eligibility checked and are facing possible termination of coverage for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic began.

States regained the ability to start winnowing their Medicaid rolls of residents whom they