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A new issue brief from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that Arkansas’ “private option” Medicaid expansion has helped reduce the number of uninsured and bring down uncompensated care costs while strengthening the state’s ACA marketplace.
Based on stakeholder interviews and early data on coverage, reduced uncompensated care costs, and other topics, this issue brief provides an initial look at implementation of Arkansas' Section 1115 Medicaid expansion demonstration waiver to require most adults newly eligible for Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion to enroll in Marketplace plans.
This issue brief explains how behavioral health parity applies in the Medicaid program, including the major provisions of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) April 10, 2015 proposed regulations, and identifies key policy issues at the intersection of behavioral health parity and Medicaid.
In this column for The Wall Street Journal’s Think Tank, Drew Altman discusses new Foundation survey findings showing that most consumers see their high deductible health plans as a bad value.
The survey is the second in a series exploring the experiences and perceptions of people who purchase their own health insurance, the group perhaps most affected by the Affordable Care Act's reforms to the individual insurance market and tax subsidies to make such coverage more affordable. It includes people in ACA-compliant plans sold both inside and outside the federal and state marketplaces, as well as those still in non-compliant plans, which took effect prior to January 2014 and in many cases do not comply with all the law’s requirements.
New HHS clarification on ACA contraceptive coverage requirement specifies that insurance plans must cover at no cost to women all of the 18 contraceptive methods approved by the FDA. If a provider recommends a specific option or product, plans must cover it at no cost as well.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires most private plans to provide coverage for women’s preventive health care, including all prescribed FDA-approved contraceptive services, without cost sharing. To better understand how this provision is being implemented by health plans, Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) staff, with the Lewin Group, reviewed the insurance plan coverage policies for 12 prescribed contraceptive methods (excluding oral contraceptives). This report presents information from 20 different insurance carriers in five states (California, Georgia, Michigan, New Jersey, and Texas) about how they are applying reasonable medical management (RMM) techniques in their coverage of women’s contraceptive services. The different forms of female birth control reviewed in this report include the contraceptive ring, the patch, injections, implants, intrauterine devices (IUDs), and sterilization.
A new Kaiser Family Foundation report released today finds how health insurance carriers are interpreting and implementing the Affordable Care Act's contraceptive coverage requirement varies, limiting contraceptive options for some women.
This issue brief examines the role that the Ryan White Program has played in helping HIV positive clients purchase insurance coverage from both a historical and an Affordable Care Act (ACA) era perspective. The ACA era analysis focuses on activities in five states during the first open enrollment period and looks specifically at insurance purchasing through the health insurance marketplaces. The states analyzed are California, Florida, Georgia, New York, and Texas.
Hosted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Alliance for Health Reform, this briefing reviewed basic questions about the Medicare program, such as: What services does Medicare provide, and how does Medicare pay for these services? How is Medicare financed? What changes did the Affordable Care Act (ACA) make to Medicare? How fast is Medicare spending growing? What are current proposals to strengthen Medicare for the future, and what are prospects for action in the new Congress?
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