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This issue brief summarizes major provisions of the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to modernize and strengthen federal Medicaid managed care regulations, which serves as an informational guide to key proposed new federal expectations and requirements of states and managed care arrangements, and federal oversight interests moving forward.
This paper presents data on Medicaid spending during the years leading up to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It uses administrative data to first examine overall spending trends and trends by service type. We then draw on additional data to analyze per enrollee spending growth during this period, both by service type and by eligibility group, to understand what drove Medicaid spending.
This brief and accompanying slides examine cost sharing - deductibles, copayments and coinsurance - in 2015 insurance plans sold on the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) federally-facilitated marketplaces. The analysis looks at out-of-pocket limits, as well as cost sharing for hospital stays, physician visits, emergency room visits, and prescription drugs, for plans across the metal levels (platinum, gold, silver and bronze).
In his latest column for The Wall Street Journal's Think Tank, Drew Altman finds the public’s health-care priorities have more to do with drug costs and other real-world issues people deal with using the health-care system than the ongoing partisan wrangling over the Affordable Care Act. All previous columns by Drew Altman are available online.
This analysis provides an early look at premium changes for individuals in the health insurance marketplaces, created under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), in major cities in 10 states plus DC. Premium changes for the benchmark silver plans vary significantly across the sample cities. The benchmark rates will increase 4.4 percent on average in 2016 without accounting for tax credits, a relatively modest amount but greater than the average increase for 2015.
On February 2, 2015, the Office of Management and Budget released President Obama’s budget for fiscal year (FY) 2016, which includes provisions related to federal spending and revenues, including Medicare savings. The President’s FY2016 budget proposal would reduce net Medicare spending by $423 billion between 2016 and 2025, and is estimated to extend the solvency of the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund by approximately five years. This brief summarizes the Medicare provisions included in the…
This issue brief provides insights about initial implementation of the financial alignment demonstrations from the perspective of dual eligible beneficiaries in Massachusetts, Ohio, and Virginia, based on 12 individual interviews conducted in early 2015. Profiles of six beneficiaries are presented to illustrate representative program experiences, along with key findings from across all of the interviews.
In this column for The Wall Street Journal's Think Tank, Drew Altman discusses why high health care prices are a problem for consumers but not a cause of renewed growth in health spending.
Virginia is among the early states to launch a 3-year capitated financial alignment demonstration to integrate payments and care for beneficiaries who are dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. This case study describes the early implementation of the demonstration based on a diverse group of stakeholder interviews.
Few Report Seeing Comparative Information about Health Care Prices and Quality, and Less Than 10% Use It Pocketbook and Consumer Issues Top Public's List of Priorities for the President and Congress, Ahead of Several ACA-Related Issues This month's Kaiser Health Tracking Poll finds public opinion on the health care law holding steady and closely divided. The share expressing a favorable view (43%) exceeds the share with an unfavorable view (42%) for the first time since…
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