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A new Kaiser Family Foundation report finds that donor governments provided US$1.3 billion in bilateral funding for family planning programs in low- and middle-income countries in 2015, essentially matching 2014 levels in real terms (after accounting for exchange rate fluctuations and inflation).
The 2016 Survey of Americans on the U.S. Role in Global Health is the latest in a series of surveys designed, conducted, and analyzed by the Kaiser Family Foundation in order to shed light on the American public’s perceptions, knowledge, and attitudes about the role of the United States in efforts to improve health for people in developing countries. This most recent survey updates trends on Americans’ perceptions of the most urgent problems facing developing countries, views on U.S. spending on health, and U.S. priorities for women’s health in developing countries. It also explores new questions on Americans’ awareness of the Zika virus outbreak and recent U.S. efforts to combat the outbreak both at home and in developing countries.
The U.S. government has a long history of supporting efforts to improve the health of women and families around the world. While many U.S. programs address women and family health generally, several are focused on them directly, including: maternal and child health (MCH), which includes immunization activities; family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH); and nutrition. This overview paper presents key findings for accompanying papers examining U.S funding for each of these sectors. They look at funding trends over time, the top country recipients of aid, the share of funding provided to the sector within the larger U.S. global health funding portfolio, and the role of the U.S. as a donor in the context of overall donor support.
Public programs and private health insurance now pay for the vast majority of contraceptive services and supplies for women. However, complex and shifting regulations shaped by state and federal policy, legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage provision, and other factors affect the scope of coverage.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires most private health insurance plans to provide coverage for a broad range of preventive services, including most contraceptives for women. This policy was at the center of a Supreme Court case brought forward by for-profit corporations (Hobby Lobby and Conestoga) that successfully claimed that the contraceptive coverage requirement violated their religious rights. Last month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear yet another challenge (Zubik v Burwell) to the contraceptive coverage requirement, this time brought by nonprofit corporations, claiming that the accommodation established by the federal government for religiously affiliated nonprofit employers with objections to contraception violates their religious rights.
In this issue of the Women's Health Issues journal, Alina Salganicoff and Laurie Sobel discuss how the private insurance reforms and expansions in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have affected access to coverage for women and where gaps remain.
As the U.S. Supreme Court gears up to hear a new round of legal challenges to the ACA’s contraceptive coverage requirement, a new Kaiser Family Foundation data note finds 10 percent of nonprofits with more than 1,000 employees have requested an "accommodation" to the health law's birth control requirement.
This partnership survey from The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation explores what feminism means in today's America, providing a detailed look at the complex views that both women and men hold about the word and the social movement that bears its name. The survey assesses the public's priorities for improving women's lives, their views on the relevance of the women's movement, the role of government in promoting gender equality, their beliefs about discrimination, levels of social and civic engagement, and views on political and policy issues such as equal pay, birth control coverage, and abortion.
In the latest post in the Policy Insights series, Jen Kates, Josh Michaud, and Allison Valentine examine how rapid emergence of Zika virus in the Americas, and its association with a severe birth defect, impact women as some health officials are calling for women to avoid pregnancy even though they have limited reproductive health access in some of the affected countries. They also examine the role of the U.S. government in addressing Zika and its impact on women in Latin America and the Caribbean.
As Medicaid marks its 50th year, the program has unquestionably become the mainstay of health coverage for low-income women in the nation. Since its inception, its role for women has continued to evolve and expand, but the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) swung open the doors for Medicaid to serve even more low-income women who lack access to private or employer-based insurance. This is because the ACA enabled states to finally eliminate Medicaid's historical “categorical” requirements, which had essentially shut out women and men without dependent children.
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