Medicaid coverage substantially improves access to health care and lessens the financial burden of medical care for low-income seniors, but the program currently reaches only half of all poor Medicare beneficiaries. This report presents findings of focus groups with low-income seniors in an effort to understand barriers to enrollment for those who are eligible for Medicaid but who are not enrolled in the program, and to learn about the experiences of low-income seniors who are enrolled in Medicaid to see how the program is working for them. The report concludes with a list of strategies for encouraging greater enrollment of low-income seniors in Medicaid.

Medicaid’s Role for Low-Income Medicare Beneficiaries

An overview that identifies low-income Medicare beneficiaries (dual eligibles), how Medicaid can provide care for them, and the challenges to accessing care.

• Fact Sheet: Medicaid’s Role for Low-Income Medicare Beneficiaries

As the nation once again faces double digit increases in health care costs, the seemingly unanswerable question of how to control the problem has suddenly returned to the nation’s radar screen. This analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, published in the January 23, 2002 online version of the journal Health Affairs (under Web Exclusives) traces the effectiveness of government and private sector attempts to reign in health care costs over the past three decades and finds that no approach that has been tried in the past 35 years has had a lasting impact.

• Health Affairs Article

Many women rely on their physicians to help them assess whether they are at risk for STDs and to provide them with information about testing, treatment and how to protect themselves. To better understand how often they discuss and screen for STDs, including HIV, the Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed 767 physicians, including 566 obstetricians and gynecologists and 201 family practice practitioners, for the National Survey of Women’s Health Care Providers on Reproductive Health.

• Toplines/Survey

Nelson Mandela and loveLife Launch National Youth Corps to fight HIV/AIDS in South Africa

Former President Nelson Mandela has announced the establishment of a national youth service corps dedicated to fighting the spread of HIV/AIDS. Known as Groundbreakers, the corps will be a major new component of loveLife – South Africa’s national HIV prevention program for youth. Mr. Mandela announced the initiative, a partnership between loveLife and the Nelson Mandela Foundation, during the presentation of the 2002 Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights in Cape Town.

“The Groundbreakers will help young South Africans take an active role in reducing the spread of HIV, while developing skills to build healthy futures,” said John Samuel, Chief Executive of the Mandela Foundation. “If HIV infections continue at their current rate, over 50% of today’s young South Africans could become HIV infected. The Groundbreakers will play a key role in motivating young people to take control of their lives, get the information they need and to stop the epidemic in its tracks.”

Groundbreakers volunteers, all between 18 and 25 years of age, will give one year of service in loveLife in return for personal and professional skills training that will help them secure future employment. Over the next three years, the Groundbreakers youth corps is expected to grow to about 600 members.

The Groundbreakers initiative will complement loveLife‘s comprehensive approach to HIV prevention for young people, which includes:

The debate over President Clinton’s national health care reform plan put health care policy at the forefront of the national agenda in 1993 and 1994. After the end of that debate, it remained to be seen whether or not health policy would hold the media’s and the public s interest to the same degree. To help answer that and other questions, a comprehensive study of health policy media coverage from 1997 through 2000 – focusing mainly on the topics of managed care, Medicare, the uninsured, and health care costs — was undertaken by researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation, in conjunction with Princeton Survey Research Associates.

Medicaid: Purchasing Prescription Drugs

A policy brief explaining how Medicaid purchases outpatient drugs and outlining the policy tools available to states to limit the rate of growth in spending on prescription drugs.

• Policy Brief (28 pages)

A report on Indiana, Massachusetts, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon, and Pennsylvania prescription drug programs illustrating the issues and challenges for delivering drugs via Medicaid, managed care, and pharmaceutical assistance programs.

• Report

On June 5, 2001, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Ford Foundation jointly sponsored a daylong Symposium to mark the 20th year of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and focus on the key challenges facing the United States at home and abroad in the epidemic’s third decade. This policy brief continues the process begun that day by highlighting some of the challenges and approaches to addressing the epidemic, with a focus on the U.S. role. The policy brief examines domestic and global challenges. It was developed as part of AIDS at 20: A National Policy Initiative, a joint initiative of the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Ford Foundation designed to help inform the U.S. response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

• Policy Brief

This article, which appeared in the Jan/Feb 2002 issue of the journal Health Affairs, examines the availability of health plan choice for employees. After reviewing previous research and providing information on the data set employed, the authors, Tom Rice, Jon Gabel, Larry Levitt and Samantha Hawkins, examine changes in the extent of health plans choice over the past decade and the choices available to workers in 2001.

Note: This publication is no longer in circulation. However, a few copies may still exist in the Foundation’s internal library that could be xeroxed. Please email order@kff.org if you would like to pursue this option.