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KFF designs, conducts and analyzes original public opinion and survey research on Americans’ attitudes, knowledge, and experiences with the health care system to help amplify the public’s voice in major national debates.
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This brief estimates the number of current Marketplace enrollees with a mental health diagnosis to understand what changes in enrollment may mean for access to services. Among the 24.3 million Marketplace enrollees in 2025, over 4.4 million individuals are estimated to have at least one mental health diagnosis on a health care claim.
The Senate Finance Committee’s reconciliation language would reduce existing state-directed payments to hospitals and nursing facilities over time until they are at or slightly above Medicare rates. This analysis identifies states that might have to reduce payment rates for hospitals or nursing facilities if the language is passed into law.
Proposed changes in eligibility rules in both SNAP and Medicaid may jeopardize some people’s access to both adequate food and health care if various provisions of the bill take effect, in part because there is a significant overlap in eligibility requirements for Medicaid and SNAP across states. Four in 10 (40%) Medicaid enrollees receive SNAP benefits.
The House of Representatives recently passed a budget reconciliation bill that would appropriate funding for cost-sharing reductions that insurers are required to provide to low-income enrollees in the Affordable Care Act marketplace. This policy watch explains what these cost-sharing reductions are, how they relate to federal spending, and what effect appropriating funding might have on premiums and the uninsured rate.
In a new column, Dr. Drew Altman, KFF's President and CEO, examines the different counts of the number of people on Medicaid that are currently in use, which range from 69 to 83 million, and why it might matter. He also discusses other ways to assess the reach of the program: “possibly it’s useful to explain why there are different numbers out there about what seemingly is an all-time simple question: how many people are…
A CMS rule, once finalized, is generally intended to exist permanently or until it is repealed.... This temporary implementation may preserve the potential for the reconciliation bill to generate official savings through changes to ACA marketplaces in later years (2027–2034) if enacted.
Prior KFF analysis allocated CBO’s federal Medicaid spending reductions and enrollment losses across the states, and this policy watch builds on that analysis to examine the potential impacts in expansion states compared with non-expansion states.
This analysis details the number of people who would become uninsured from policy changes in the ACA Marketplaces and Medicaid. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that, taken together, these changes will result in 16 million more uninsured people in the year 2034 than would otherwise be the case.
In a new column, Dr. Drew Altman, KFF’s President and CEO, discusses the limits of polling on policy, and what we have learned over more than 30 years of polling about how giving people more information and arraying tradeoffs can change opinion, including on the health policy changes and funding cuts in the current reconciliation bill.
This poll finds two-thirds of the public view the "One Big Beautiful Bill" legislation unfavorably, and its favorability erodes further when people hear about its potential health impacts. As Congress debates changes to Medicaid and the ACA as part of the bill, each program's popularity is at a record high.
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