FMAP: Four letters that drive the biggest source of federal funding for state child welfare services
The world of child welfare includes policy language that is chock full of cryptic jargon and shorthand that is key to understanding how the system works, but difficult to learn and remember. So The Imprint has worked with Mary Bissell, a veteran of child welfare policy and partner at Child Focus, to help make it a little easier.
This is the first in a series of explanatory pieces about some of the critical and confusing lingo involved in child welfare. In each installment, we take one of the field’s oft-used acronyms or initialisms and break it down. But instead of a boring old text-heavy primer, artist Jonathan Muroya, who is currently an illustration fellow at Fatherly, will adapt the lessons into a comic strip-style series for each term.
We begin today with FMAP: the Federal Medicaid Assistance Percentage. This term is at the heart of the third largest entitlement program, Medicaid, but it is also used to determine how much money each state receives for its child welfare system.
We will also feature an audio breakdown of each term in the Alphabet Soup series at The Imprint Weekly Podcast. You can find those segments on our podcast homepage.
