Filling the need for trusted information on national health issues
The health and economic effects of the pandemic have significant implications for state Medicaid programs, as more people become eligible and enroll in Medicaid at the same time that states may face declines in revenues. This brief presents current data for key economic indicators to help understand how they could affect Medicaid enrollment and spending.
This tracker provides the number of cases and deaths from novel coronavirus by country, the trend in case and death counts by country, and a global map of showing which countries have cases and deaths. There have been over 7.2 million confirmed cases and 411,000 confirmed deaths worldwide. There have been nearly 2 million confirmed cases and 112,000 confirmed deaths in the United States.
This page tracks recent state actions to extend Medicaid postpartum coverage, including approved and pending 1115 waivers, legislation that will require the state to seek federal approval through a SPA or 1115 waiver, submitted and approved SPAs, and coverage financed solely with state funds.
COVID-19 has disproportionately negatively affected the physical and mental health, academic growth, and economic security of children of color. At the same time, the limited data available to date suggest some children of color may be less likely to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, leaving them at elevated risk as the virus continues to spread and as many return to in-person school.
In this commentary for Barron’s, Cynthia Cox explores the impact to the American public as the U.S. health insurance system adjusts to the COVID-19 pandemic. She uses the experience of the past year and a half to raise questions about broader issues of fairness in the distribution of health care costs in the country.
This brief explores key issues and poses questions regarding PEPFAR’s future, providing a roadmap for the major decisions ahead for the program. It identifies eight key, interrelated issues facing the administration, Congress, and other PEPFAR stakeholders.
This post examines a growing COVID-19 vaccine gap in Red and Blue America, with the share of the population that have been fully vaccinated in counties that voted for President Biden in 2020 increasing more rapidly than the share in counties that voted for President Trump.
The U.S territories – American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) – have faced an array of longstanding fiscal and health challenges that were exacerbated by recent natural disasters and most recently by the COVID-19 pandemic. Differences in Medicaid financing, including a statutory cap and match rate, have contributed to broader fiscal and health systems challenges for the territories. Congress is currently debating legislation to address the looming Medicaid funding cliff. This brief builds on data in an earlier brief released in May 2021 examining the effects of the pandemic and the implications of the fiscal cliff and incorporates findings from a questionnaire sent to Medicaid Directors in territories in the summer of 2021.
A surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations among people who have not been vaccinated in August is adding billions of dollars in preventable costs to the nation’s health-care system, an updated KFF analysis finds. In August, the new analysis estimates that the preventable costs of treating unvaccinated patients in hospitals total $3.7…
This updated analysis for the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker estimates that the preventable costs of treating unvaccinated patients in hospitals total $3.7 billion in August, almost twice the estimates for June and July combined. The three-month total now stand at an estimated $5.7 billion.
