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Congress has repeatedly extended several pandemic-era flexibilities around Medicare coverage of telehealth, but with a few key exceptions most pandemic-era telehealth flexibilities remain temporary. This brief provides answers to key questions about the current scope of Medicare telehealth coverage, including both temporary and permanent changes adopted through legislation and regulation, and policy considerations that lie ahead.
In his latest column, President and CEO Dr. Drew Altman asks if prior authorization review could be eliminated entirely, discussing how it might be done and the tradeoffs.
This brief describes the intersection between Medicaid and SNAP and discusses how information from SNAP may be leveraged by states when implementing the new Medicaid work requirements.
To better understand how states are preparing for Medicaid work requirements, states were asked to discuss anticipated challenges to implementing work requirements by the end of 2026, including related system changes and data matching.
In this column, KFF President and CEO Drew Altman explores the state of consumer protections in health care and explains why, even with consumer frustration clear, Congress is unlikely to pursue major new health insurance protections but there could be some modest steps.
A new KFF analysis finds higher Medicare spending among people who switched from Medicare Advantage to traditional Medicare than for similar beneficiaries who were in traditional Medicare all along.
This analysis looks at traditional Medicare spending among people who choose to disenroll from Medicare Advantage and obtain coverage under traditional Medicare during the annual Medicare open enrollment period. It compares their traditional Medicare spending (Parts A and B) in the year following disenrollment to similar people who were continuously covered by traditional Medicare, using data from the Medicare Beneficiary Summary File (MBSF) for 2021 and 2022.
In his latest column, KFF President and CEO Drew Altman discusses a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI)'s payment and delivery demonstrations have cost Medicare money, and what it means for the future of value-based payment.
With the high costs of emergency department visits of significant importance to consumers and policymakers, this analysis examines claims data from privately insured individuals with large employer health plans, to examine the role that facility fees play in rising cost of emergency care.
A new analysis of health insurers’ 2021 financial data shows that insurers continue to report much higher gross margins per enrollee in the Medicare Advantage market than in other health insurance markets. The analysis examines insurers’ financial data in the Medicare Advantage, Medicaid managed care, individual (non-group), and fully insured group (employer) markets.
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