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The News Media and “Entitlement Reform”
In the coming debate about the deficit, policymakers will struggle to craft a package of spending reductions and new revenues that both Democrats and Republicans can agree on, totaling as much as four trillion dollars over ten years. Medicare, Medicaid and potentially the Affordable Care Act will have their turn…
Perspective Read More Why Premiums Will Change for People Who Now Have Nongroup Insurance
The federal government recently released draft regulations that address the benefits, market rules, and rating practices for nongroup coverage. Before reform, the nongroup market was widely acknowledged to be broken, with restricted access, limited benefits, high administrative costs, and frequent and large premium increases subject to inadequate oversight. Recent requests for…
Perspective Read More How Have Insurers Fared Under the Affordable Care Act?
This analysis tracks the financial performance of insurers in the individual market by evaluating trends in the medical loss ratio (MLR) in the pre-ACA landscape from 2010 to 2013 and estimates the MLR for the first full year of Affordable Care Act implementation in 2014. Findings suggest that although performance varied among insurers, insurers overall had roughly comparable financial performance in 2014 as in recent prior years.
Perspective Read More Pulling It Together: Critical Path To Health Reform
In this new section of our Web site, I pull together ideas and data from across the Foundation’s work to try to paint a bigger picture that hopefully helps to illuminate critical health policy issues. This is not a blog or a personal position statement. This second installment of the…
Perspective Read More Pulling It Together: Health IN the Economy
I am writing this Pulling It Together column about this one chart and its potential interpretations and implications. Source: Key Findings: Kaiser Health Tracking Poll: Election 2008 — April 2008, Kaiser Family Foundation, April 2008. This chart from our most recent tracking poll shows the economy rising as a political issue…
Perspective Read More Pulling it Together: The “Third School” for Controlling Health Care Costs?
For as long as I have been in the field, there have been two dominant schools of thought about how to control health care costs. One school, The Regulators, believed that the best way to slow increasing costs was to control the total resources going into the health care system:…
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Pulling it Together: How the ACA Can Help The Homeless
Estimates are that there are approximately 630,000 people who are homeless on any given night in the U.S. — about two-thirds in shelters and one-third on the street or without real shelter. Several million people are estimated to experience homelessness over the course of a year. About two-thirds are individuals and the…
Perspective Read More Pulling It Together: Critical Path To Health Reform: Stage Two
Will the new president make health a top early priority and exercise real leadership on the issue? One of the big lessons of the health reform debate of the early nineties is that the Congress needs to be fully engaged in the process early on. Nevertheless, for health reform legislation…
Perspective Read More Pulling It Together: What Do We Want Health Insurance To Be?
Trends in the health insurance marketplace show substantial growth in high deductible health plans, especially among smaller firms, where 35% of workers are now covered by plans with a deductible of $1,000 or more. That’s according to our recently released employer health benefits survey, which we have been conducting now…
Perspective Read More Pulling It Together: Bono, Jon Stewart and the HIV/AIDS Message
One of the most interesting conversations on a health topic happened recently on The Daily Show between Bono and Jon Stewart. Bono told Stewart that we were “at the beginning of the end of the AIDS epidemic,” promising an announcement the next day that would explain how a combination of…
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