Program Evaluation

In 1997, Congress passed legislation creating the State Childrens Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), the first major federally funded health program to be established since Medicare and Medicaid were enacted in 1965.

Twenty-one states have implemented "wage pass-through" programs with the stated expectation that doing so will help address the shortage of direct care workers employed by long-term care providers in their states. A wage pass-through is an additional allocation of funds provided through Medicaid reimbursement for the express purpose of increasing compensation for direct care workers.

This paper describes the findings from nine Case Study states. These case studies were conducted: (1) To examine early implementation experience among the states in order to gain an understanding of the programmatic, fiscal, and political context in which design decisions were made.