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Pulling back the curtains on wage-theft enforcement in MN; Trump's latest attack is on RFK, Jr; NM LGBTQ+ equality group endorses 2024 'Rock Star' candidates; Michigan's youth justice reforms: Expanded diversion, no fees.

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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says rebuilding Baltimore's Key Bridge will be challenging and expensive. An Alabama Democrat flips a state legislature seat and former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman dies at 82.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

Medicaid at 50: New Research Shows Long-Term Benefits for West Virginia Kids

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Tuesday, July 28, 2015   

CHARLESTON, W.Va. – Medicaid is 50 years old this week, and the impact it's had on the lives of children is being praised, both by advocates and academics.

Renate Pore, director of health care policy for West Virginians for Affordable Healthcare, says 60 percent of the pregnancy care and births in the state are covered by Medicaid. The program covers about half of West Virginia children.

Pore says the effects are "huge," in part because problems before or at birth can last a lifetime.

"For pregnant women and for children, it has just been an enormous program for West Virginia," she says. "Not only the services themselves, but the fact that they don't have to worry."

Pore says it would be hard to even imagine the state's healthcare system without the program, although critics have tried to limit Medicaid or reduce its funding as a cost-cutting measure.

Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families, is part of a coalition that researched how kids helped by Medicaid do later in life. She says it makes a profound difference in several ways.

"Some studies are now finding that children who received Medicaid actually pay more taxes as adults and use fewer government subsidies," she says. "The government is getting a great return on investment by providing kids with Medicaid."

States receive federal funding under Medicaid and decide how to best use it, within certain guidelines. The healthcare program was created primarily for poor families and those with disabilities.

West Virginia took advantage of an option under the Affordable Care Act to expand Medicaid to cover working poor families making incomes of up to one-and-one-third times the federal poverty rate.


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