Volume 390, Number 10114 
WORLD REPORT Without adequate federal funding, CHIP is on the verge of collapse in several states. Susan Jaffe, The Lancet’s Washington correspondent, reports.
“Whoever would have thought that health care for children—that has support on both sides of the aisle—would be in this situation?” asked Deborah Oswalt, executive director of the Virginia Health Care Foundation. [full story here]
…
Dialysis crisis followed shift by Medicaid
For the past year, a dialysis machine has been keeping Karletta Edwards’ mother alive, substituting for her kidneys to cleanse her blood three times a week.
But in January, shortly after Ohio’s Medicaid program transferred her, along with more
than 25,000 other low-income people in Northeast Ohio, into an HMO, something went wrong.
The state’s contracts with insurance companies are expected to save Medicaid $24 million this year, by the time some 125,000 blind, disabled or older people are placed in privately run managed care plans.
Even though the companies are paid 6.6 percent less, Medicaid’s average cost to care for the same population, state officials say the health coverage will remain the same…. Four weeks ago, Edwards received a desperate call from her mother. The transportation service that picked up Emma Hansen from her East Cleveland home and brought her to the dialysis center didn’t show up. [Continued here]