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State Health Facts is a KFF project that provides free, up-to-date, and easy-to-use health data for all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the United States. It offers data on specific types of health insurance coverage, including employer-sponsored, Medicaid, Medicare, as well as people who are uninsured by demographic characteristics, including age, race/ethnicity, work status, gender, and income. There are also data on health insurance status for a state's population overall and broken down by age, gender, and income.
On June 16, 2008, Kaiser Family Foundation Vice President Gary Claxton testified about state-based health reform efforts as part of the Senate Finance Committee's Preparing For Launch Health Reform Summit. In his prepared testimony, he examined the role of Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program, as well as the way various federal laws and policies may limit innovation at the state level. Testimony (.pdf)
I am writing this Pulling It Together column about this one chart and its potential interpretations and implications. Source: Key Findings: Kaiser Health Tracking Poll: Election 2008 -- April 2008, Kaiser Family Foundation, April 2008. This chart from our most recent tracking poll shows the economy rising as a political issue and health care falling, with Iraq in the middle. Findings from other polling groups will show the same thing for as long as the economy…
As the country faces another economic downturn, many states are scrambling to deal with the impact of poor economic conditions on programs, like Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), that are reliant on state funding. To be better able to cope, states are looking for fiscal relief from the federal government as well as obtaining a moratorium on federal regulations that would reduce Medicaid funding for states from the Congress. New analyses…
Medicaid, SCHIP and Economic Downturn: Policy Challenges and Policy Responses A new analysis conducted for the Kaiser Family Foundation's Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured examines the implications of a downturn for health coverage and state programs and projects the impact of one percentage point rise in the national unemployment rate on Medicaid and SCHIP and the number of uninsured individuals. The analysis also documents how federal fiscal relief during the last economic downturn of…
A new analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum examines the health coverage, access to health care, and health status of Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander ethnic groups in the United States, and finds that certain subgroups are doing much worse than others in terms of health insurance coverage and access to health care. For example, Korean Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders are about…
Medicaid in a Declining Economy: Limited Approaches for States to Control Spending This brief analyzes results from its annual 50-state budget surveys of Medicaid directors from 2003 to 2007. The historical results describe how states adopted a wide array of Medicaid cost containment strategies during the last economic downturn and were assisted by the federal government to avoid deeper Medicaid cuts. Issue Brief (.pdf) See related material on this issue
Diane Rowland testified at a hearing on the instability of health coverage before the Health Subcommittee of the U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means. Her testimony discussed the growing share of Americans who are uninsured and without adequate health insurance coverage and highlighted the key characteristics and issues with regard to the uninsured as well as the financial burdens for medical care faced by America's families. Testimony (.pdf)
Health Affairs Article: Comparing the Assets of Uninsured Households to Cost Sharing Under High Deductible Health Plans Relatively few uninsured households have enough financial assets to cover the cost-sharing in consumer-driven health plans tied to Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), according to this study by Kaiser Family Foundation researchers published as a Health Affairs Web Exclusive on April 15, 2008. Consumer-driven plans generally require enrollees to pay for most health-care expenses themselves until they reach the plan’s relatively high…
In this new section of our Web site, I pull together ideas and data from across the Foundation’s work to try to paint a bigger picture that hopefully helps to illuminate critical health policy issues. This is not a blog or a personal position statement. This second installment of the new Pulling It Together series lays out the steps that could lead to the first major national health reform debate since the early nineties. Other…
Will there be a big debate about health reform in the general election? If there is it will elevate the issue further, engage the public, and create momentum and a mandate for action by a new President and Congress. If, however, the debate about health is tepid or health is eclipsed by other issues such as the economy and Iraq, momentum could falter. One measure of the level of debate will be whether or not…
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