Here's a sobering thought: Nearly 40% of all children in the U.S. are eligible for the Children's Health Insurance Program, which provides automatic healthcare coverage for the poor. That means 4 in 10 kids in the U.S. are growing up in poverty or near-poverty.
Here's another sobering thought. Not every kid who is eligible gets coverage through the entitlement program. Their parents must apply for CHIP/Medicaid and many don't.
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The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has joined the entities urging the CMS to publish the Medicare earnings and de-identified clinical data of individual physicians. But the foundation stopped short of calling for widespread public release to any interested party.
In recent years, the CMS has published several datasets for the first time, including average hospital charges for common Medicare treatments and the prescribing patterns of doctors in Medicare's drug-benefit program. Now a ruling this year in a 30-year-old lawsuit is prompting the agency to consider releasing a long-sought dataset that would show how individual doctors care for and are paid to treat patients on Medicare.
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Four charitable foundations in healthcare and one in journalism will participate in a $2 million contest to spark innovative uses of healthcare data.
“Health is an area where journalism, open data and public information overlap, giving us a direct, tangible opportunity to help people learn more and make smart choices through the use of technology and data,” Michael Maness, vice president for journalism and media innovation at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, said in a news release. The charity is named for the founders of the former Knight-Ridder chain of newspapers.
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