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Provides a summary of health provisions in the fourth major legislative initiative to address COVID-19, the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act.

This blog is an overview of the outstanding questions related to the $100 billion for hospitals and other providers in the CARES Act and whether there will be meaningful protections for the uninsured and people with private coverage who could face surprise bills.

With the Medicare open enrollment period set to begin October 15, a new KFF analysis finds that 7 in 10 beneficiaries (71%) say that they didn’t compare their coverage options during a recent open enrollment season. Twenty-nine percent said they did compare Medicare plans. But not shopping around can have…

To help inform the ongoing debate, KFF conducted four focus groups in July and August 2021 with direct care workers and unpaid caregivers who provide HCBS, assisting seniors and people with disabilities with daily self-care and household activities. These focus groups are not necessarily generalizable to all caregivers, but can provide insight into their experiences to help inform current policy debates.

This policy watch examines recent state and federal efforts to extend postpartum Medicaid coverage beyond 60 days.

In this Axios column, Drew Altman examines the lessons for COVID-19 as a political issue from Governor Gavin Newsom’s resounding win in California’s recall election.

Many Medicare beneficiaries face high annual out-of-pocket costs for dental and hearing care — services that generally aren’t covered in traditional Medicare, but typically are covered by Medicare Advantage plans though the scope and value of these benefits vary, finds a new KFF analysis. The analysis shows that, among beneficiaries…

This analysis builds on our prior work – Medicare and Dental Coverage: A Closer Look – by analyzing hearing and vision use, out-of-pocket spending and cost-related barriers to care among Medicare beneficiaries as well as hearing and vision benefits in Medicare Advantage plans. It also incorporates top-level findings from the analysis of dental services to provide a comprehensive profile of dental, hearing, and vision benefits in Medicare.

Medicare Part D, the outpatient prescription drug benefit for Medicare beneficiaries, provides coverage above a catastrophic threshold for high out-of-pocket drug costs, but there is no cap on total out-of-pocket drug costs that beneficiaries pay each year. Recent legislative proposals would add a cap on out-of-pocket spending under Part D. This analysis focuses on the potential impact of different out-of-pocket spending caps in terms of how many beneficiaries would be affected and how much they could save.

The federal government spent $321 more per person for beneficiaries enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans than for those in traditional Medicare in 2019, a gap that amounted to $7 billion in additional spending on the increasingly popular private plans that year, finds a new KFF analysis. The Medicare Advantage spending…