New funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and federally qualified community health centers (FQHCs) officially lapsed on October 1, the start of the 2018 federal fiscal year. Authorized by the Affordable Care Act and later extended by the MACRA law, both programs have received bipartisan support but have also faced the frequent prospect of funding cuts because of the lack of bipartisan “pay-fors” to offset the programs’ costs.
In recent weeks, bipartisan agreements to extend funding for both programs for five years have been announced by separate groups of lawmakers in the Senate and the House. However, neither agreement included the necessary spending offsets to ensure passage into law. As a result, despite bipartisan support for these programs, Congress has not yet found a way to move funding reauthorizations into law.
Pending legislative relief, affected providers and patients would begin seeing the effects of these cuts in early 2018. NextGen Healthcare will continue following this story and providing updates via What’s Next and our monthly Health Reform Simplified webinar.
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