As part of The Faces of Medicare, a collection of fact sheets profiling the characteristics and health needs of different groups of Medicare beneficiaries, provides descriptive information about women on Medicare, who constitute nearly seventy percent of Medicare’s poor.

• Fact Sheet

The Medicare beneficiary population is often described in homogenous terms, yet those covered by the program vary significantly in terms of their health, income, supplemental insurance status, and medical service use. profiles the following six groups within the Medicare population, providing basic information, trends and data:

• Healthy retirees, who represent less than 10 percent of the total Medicare population, but sometimes are portrayed as typical of all seniors,
• Under-65 disabled beneficiaries, whose disproportionately high rates of health and cognitive problems are compounded by low incomes,
• Racial and ethnic minority beneficiaries, who by 2025 will account for one in three Medicare beneficiaries,
• Beneficiaries with cognitive impairments, now nearly one in four Medicare beneficiaries, who face unique challenges navigating the health care system,
• Low-income elderly and disabled, who remain among the most vulnerable,
• Women, who constitute over 56 percent of Medicare beneficiaries but nearly 70 percent of Medicare’s poor.

• Fact Sheet: About
• Fact Sheet: – Cognitively Impaired
• Fact Sheet: – Healthy Retirees
• Fact Sheet: – Low Income
• Fact Sheet: – Medicare and Women
• Fact Sheet: – Minority Americans
• Fact Sheet: – Under 65 Disabled

This fact sheet provides an overview of the Medicaid program’s increasing reliance on managed care to deliver services.

• Fact Sheet

Today, one out of every four disabled Medicaid beneficiaries receives health care through managed care. This Background Paper provides insights into how Medicaid managed care is working for individuals with disabilities, based on the findings from seven focus groups held in Florida and New Mexico. The key findings show that adults and children with disabilities feel alone in managing their health care and that important components of managed care – coordination and gatekeeping role that primary care physicians play — do not seem to be functioning well for research participants. Furthermore, the study shows that focus group participants feel overwhelmed and want help from their PCPs in coordinating their many health services and support encouraging managed care plans to give incentives to primary care physicians for managing their care.

• Report:

Health Coverage for Latino Children: Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program

An overview of Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and health care coverage for Latino Children. This issue brief was released at a briefing for Hispanic and Latino Media in Los Angeles, CA on June 24, 1999. The briefing is part of a series, Latino Voices for Latino Health: Three Cities, One Vision that is jointly coordinated by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Latino Issues Forum. Other partners in the project include the nation’s leading Spanish-language media organizations. The project focuses on three health topics that have been identified as priorities for the Latino Community: Medicare; Children’s Health Insurance (CHIP); and, HIV/AIDS. This Issue Update is also available in Spanish

Selected

A press release announcing the 1999 Kaiser Media Fellows.

• Selected

This article, authored by Diane Rowland, Alina Salganicoff, and Patricia Keenan of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, assesses Medicaid’s contributions as a public financing program for health insurance coverage for the poor over the last three decades. It reviews Medicaid’s impact on the low-income population and discusses the limitations of the program as a strategy for improving the health of low-income groups. While gaps in coverage and limitations in access persist between the poor and the privately insured, overall, Medicaid has helped achieve expanded coverage, greater access, and better health care for millions of low-income children and women.

The article appeared in the Annual Review of Public Health 1999 20:403-26.

Access Article: “The Key To The Door: Medicaid’s Role in Improving Health Care for Women and Children.”

This report analyzes Maryland’s Medicaid managed care program, HealthChoice, an ambitious and broad-reaching effort to reform the financing and delivery of health care for over 300,000 low-income individuals. Implemented in 1997, HealthChoice contains certain innovative features not found in many other state reform efforts, such as protections for traditional providers and development of a new risk adjustment system. This report is one of a series of reports from The Kaiser/Commonwealth Low-Income Coverage and Access Project. This project examines how changes in the Medicaid Program have affected health insurance coverage and access to care for the low-income population in eight states: California, Florida, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas.

• Report

This fact sheet summarizes the reasons why low-wage workers are less likely to have employer-sponsored health insurance than workers with higher incomes and therefore, are more likely to be uninsured.

• Fact Sheet

Health News Index May/June, 1999

The May/June 1999 edition of the Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard Health News Index includes questions about major health stories covered in the news, including questions about Gun Control and Youth Violence. The survey is based on a national random sample of 1,000 Americans conducted June 11-16, 1999 which measures public knowledge of health stories covered by news media during the previous month. The Health News Index is designed to help the news media and people in the health field gain a better understanding of which health stories in the news Americans are following and what they understand about those health issues. Every two months, Kaiser/Harvard issues a new index report.

• HNI May-June 1999
• Topline/Survey