Filling the need for trusted information on national health issues
States Face New Budget and Workforce Challenges As Temporary Federal Aid Nears End And Health Reform Planning Heats Up WASHINGTON, D.C. – Due to the nation’s deep recession, states experienced rapid growth in their Medicaid enrollment and spending last year and expect additional growth, though at a slower pace, in fiscal…
Issue brief provides an overview of how a per capita cap financing structure could work, including implications for the federal government, state governments, beneficiaries and health care providers
Revamping traditional Medicare’s benefit design and restricting “first-dollar” supplemental coverage could reduce federal spending, simplify cost sharing, protect against high medical costs, decrease out-of-pocket spending for many beneficiaries, and provide more help to those with low incomes — but would be unlikely to achieve all of these goals simultaneously.
Premium support is a general term used to describe an approach to reform Medicare that aims to reduce the growth in Medicare spending. These FAQs raise and discuss basic questions about the possible effects of a premium support system for Medicare beneficiaries, the federal budget, health care providers, and private health plans.
With its inclusion in the House GOP health plan released last month, the idea of converting Medicare into a premium support system once again features prominently in Capitol Hill policy discussions about the future of Medicare, the federal health insurance program that covers 57 million seniors and people with disabilities.…
This fact sheet provides an overview of U.S. government global health policy and engagement.
The FY15 Omnibus Appropriations Act contains $5.4 billion in emergency funding to address the Ebola crisis – a significant increase in total U.S. support for global health. Aside from the additional funding for Ebola, global health funding remained essentially flat at $9.2 billion, according to a new Kaiser Family Foundation…
After Congress provided an unprecedented level of emergency funding for Ebola in FY15 in response to the West African outbreak, beyond regular appropriations for global health programs, FY16 returned to business as usual. There was no additional emergency funding and global health amounts remained essentially flat funding compared to prior years. The FY16 Omnibus Appropriations bill, which was signed into law by the President on December 18, 2015, included an estimated $10.2 billion in funding for global health programs continuing a trend of essentially flat funding since FY10.
In response to rising drug costs, some policymakers and presidential candidates, including Republican Donald Trump and Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, have proposed allowing Medicare to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies over the price of prescription drugs, in contrast to the current approach under Medicare Part D drug where…
This issue brief provides a landscape of the status of U.S. funding for Zika, a mosquito-transmitted infection that in pregnant women can cause microcephaly as well as other serious birth defects. The brief compares the Congressionally approved Zika funding levels, which provides $1.1 billion to the Zika response, to the President’s February 22nd request, the House and Senate bills that passed each chamber in May, and a Conference Agreement that had been approved by the House in June, but was blocked in the Senate and opposed by the Administration.
