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  • Restructuring Medicare’s Benefit Design: Implications for Beneficiaries and Spending

    Report

    Several deficit-reduction plans have proposed combining Medicare's separate deductibles for hospital and physician services, standardizing cost sharing across types of benefits, and establishing a new limit on annual out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries. A new Kaiser Family Foundation study examines the potential implications of proposals to revamp Medicare’s cost-sharing requirements as a way of reducing federal spending. The analysis projects what would happen if Medicare's current benefit design were replaced with a unified deductible of $550;…

  • Family Health Premiums Rise 4 Percent to Average of $15,745 in 2012, National Benchmark Employer Survey Finds

    News Release

    Menlo Park, Calif. – Annual premiums for employer-sponsored family health coverage reached $15,745 this year, up 4 percent from last year, with workers on average paying $4,316 toward the cost of their coverage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research & Educational Trust (HRET) 2012 Employer Health Benefits Survey released today. This year’s premium increase is moderate by historical standards, but outpaced the growth in workers’ wages (1.7 percent) and general inflation (2.3 percent). Since…

  • Health Care Costs Keep Rising … Why and Who Pays?

    Video

    The U.S. spends more on health care than other large, wealthy countries. Concerns about rising costs aren't new, yet somehow we keep paying the bill. In this video, KFF’s Larry Levitt explains how we got here, who bears the consequences and why reining in spending systematically may be central to the next big health care debate.

  • Questions About Essential Health Benefits

    Perspective

    The Institute of Medicine (IOM) recently issued its long-awaited report on defining the essential health benefits under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). As expected, the committee preparing the IOM report did not recommend which specific services should be covered, but rather discussed what the process should be for defining the essential benefits, which all insurers selling coverage to individuals and small businesses will have to provide beginning in 2014. Somewhat unexpected was their recommendation to set a…

  • Private Insurance Benefits and Cost-Sharing Under the ACA

    Perspective

    The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently released guidance on the two key components that determine the level of protection that private insurance plans will provide to consumers under health reform. The first involves the services that insurance plans must cover, and the second involves how much patients must pay out-of-pocket for those services. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) establishes new rules for what insurers must provide for both components starting in 2014.…

  • Medicaid 101: What You Need to Know

    Event Date:
    Event

    The Alliance for Health Reform and the Kaiser Family Foundation present a briefing to discuss the basics of Medicaid and its role in the health care system. Speakers address questions on how the program is administered, how much it costs and how it is financed, as well as how the Affordable Care Act affects the program and what states are doing to transform Medicaid to meet current and future needs of its beneficiaries. For more…

  • Poll: 7 in 10 Want the Trump Administration to Make the Affordable Care Act Work Rather Than Make it Fail

    News Release

    As the Trump administration begins implementing Thursday’s executive order aimed at providing alternatives to the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace plans, a new Kaiser Health Tracking Poll finds a large majority of the public (71%) want President Trump and his administration to do what they can to make the current law work. Fielded just prior to Thursday’s executive order, the poll finds fewer Americans (21%) say that the president and his administration should do what they…

  • Tracking Section 1332 State Innovation Waivers

    Fact Sheet

    This interactive map shows the status of all Section 1332 waivers requested by states. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) allows states to apply for innovation waivers to alter key ACA requirements in the individual and small group insurance markets and can be used to shore up fragile insurance markets, address unique state insurance market issues, or experiment with alternative models of providing coverage to state residents.