This policy brief provides an overview of the Medicaid program’s increasing reliance on managed care to deliver services. The goal of this approach is to improve access to care and coordination of care by assuring that enrollees have a "medical home" with a primary care provider, and to rely more heavily on preventive and primary care.

In his latest column, the Kaiser Family Foundation's President and CEO examines what the message from the Massachusetts special election is for the health care debate based on the results of the Foundation's recent post-election poll with The Washington Post and the Harvard School of Public Health.

This issue brief provides an overview of the primary components of state high-risk pools, discusses their benefits and challenges, and concludes with a discussion of high-risk pools in national health reform.

The January Health Tracking Poll finds the public divided evenly between support and opposition to the health reform bills in Congress, but also that many Americans remain unaware of key provisions in the legislation and often react positively when told about them. 

The Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009 (CHIPRA) includes new Express Lane Eligibility provisions that provide states new options to reach and enroll eligible but uninsured low-income children into Medicaid and CHIP by relying on eligibility findings from other need-based programs, such as Head Start or the National School Lunch Program. This brief, the third in a series called Putting Children on the Express Lane to Health Insurance, brief provides an overview of key decisions a state will need to address in designing an ELE initiative.

As part of the Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard University partnership series, these toplines are of a poll taken to better understand how health care played into the mix of issues and frustrations that brought voters to the polls in the Massachusetts special election for the U.S. Senate.

This brief compares the Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program provisions in the House health reform legislation, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, as passed by the full House on Nov. 7, 2009, with the Senate’s reform legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as passed on Dec. 24, 2009.

This issue brief highlights the current health coverage status of young adults (ages 19-29), current approaches to expand coverage to this population, and how they might be affected by national health reform.

This issue brief discusses the treatment of coverage for abortion services under the major health reform bills and explores the possible impact of the leading House and Senate passed legislation on coverage for abortion services.

This brief examines the role of high-risk pools as a coverage safety net today and reviews key issues involved in implementing a national high-risk pool, which would be one of the first provisions to be implemented under pending health reform legislation.