Concerns over negative impacts to students’ out-of-school public insurance benefits appear to be delaying the release of a U.S. Department of Education (USDE) final rule that is supposed to ease the process of obtaining parental consent for Medicaid school-based health services. While some worry that children’s school-based services can adversely affect outside services, there appears to be no concrete examples of such. In fact, parental consent forms allowing for school-based Medicaid billing explicitly state that such permissions will not affect lifetime coverage or any other insured benefits.

However, last August 26th organizations said in a letter to the USDE that, “Parents are routinely informed, sometimes even after services in other settings have already been rendered, that the Medicaid agency has deemed them duplicative with school-based services and their coverage is denied.”

The final rule was expected to be released in January and there is still no release date in sight.

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