Coverage

The Biden Administration’s requirement for private insurers to cover the cost of at-home rapid COVID-19 tests for their enrollees does not apply to Medicare. Medicare Advantage plans (offered by private insurers) have the option to cover at-home tests but are not required to do so. This policy watch examines whether some of the largest private Medicare Advantage plans are covering the cost of at-home rapid tests for COVID-19.

With the COVID-19 pandemic impacting communities of color disproportionately in their health and economic well-being, long-term racial and ethnic disparities have received growing attention. But these inequities in our health system are not new and are a part of larger issues of systemic racism. An updated KFF chart pack analyzes…

In this commentary for Barron’s, Cynthia Cox and Lindsey Dawson examine the cost and availability of at-home COVID-19 tests and how the new Biden administration policy requiring private insurances to cover their costs may work. 

This policy watch discusses the implications of Medicare’s preliminary National Coverage Determination for the new Alzheimer’s drug, Aduhelm, on the 2022 Medicare Part B premium and the possibility of an adjustment based on the coverage decision. The piece also discusses the implications for Medicare spending and the connection to ongoing policy discussions around prescription drug proposals in the Build Back Better Act.

This data note explores findings from on an 8-day online search for at home COVID-19 tests at major retailers. The findings are described against the backdrop of the Biden Administration policy requiring plans to cover the cost of these tests. We find that these tests remain hard to find and that this limited availability could negatively affect the success of the reimbursement strategy.

For more than a year-and-a-half, the continuous enrollment requirement tied to enhanced Medicaid funding during the COVID-19 pandemic has all but halted enrollment “churn,” the temporary loss of coverage in which people disenroll from Medicaid and then re-enroll within a short period of time. Such disenrollments are expected to resume…

Recent policy actions and proposals in Medicaid have renewed focus on the problem of churn, or temporary loss of coverage in which enrollees disenroll and then re-enroll within a short period of time. We find that 10% of full-benefit enrollees have a gap in coverage of less than a year, and rates are higher for children and adults compared to aged and people with disabilities. Churn has implications for access to care as well as administrative costs faced by states.

The release of the Census Bureau’s annual health insurance estimates for 2019 highlighted the challenges posed by the lag in data on insurance coverage given the unprecedented social and economic changes that have occurred since the 2019 data were collected. This post discusses trends in insurance coverage leading up to the start of the pandemic and what we know about more recent changes in coverage.

Few issues are likely to matter as much to voters in November’s presidential election as President Trump’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic crisis, which have left almost 200,000 Americans dead and prompted job layoffs and furloughs affecting tens of millions of Americans. A new election brief compares…

Surprisingly, in comparison to the nearly 9% drop in employment from March to June, early data suggests that employers had kept coverage rates remarkably steady, at least through mid-summer. We find that enrollment in the fully-insured group market dropped by just 1.3% from the end of March through the end of June.