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If Tuesday’s vice presidential debate turns to Medicaid and work requirements, the policy trade-offs will be about working people’s access to Medicaid coverage – not about increasing work.
This data note looks at Medicaid spending per full-benefit enrollee, examining variation by state and by eligibility group, as well as variation within a given state and eligibility group.
This new fact sheet examines key questions around the potential changes President-elect Donald Trump and the next Congress may seek to make in Medicaid, a program that covers 73 million people nationally.
The House Republican Plan (“A Better Way”) released on June 22, 2016, includes a proposal to convert federal Medicaid financing from an open-ended entitlement to a per capita allotment or a block grant (based on a state choice). This proposal is part of a larger package designed to replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and reduce federal spending for health care. Often tied to deficit reduction, proposals to convert Medicaid’s financing structure to a per capita cap or block grant have been proposed before. Such changes represent a fundamental change in the financing structure of the program with major implications for beneficiaries, providers, states and localities. Key things to understand about a per capita cap include the following: how a per capita cap works, key design challenges, and implications of a per capita cap.
Medicare as a Share of the Federal Budget, 2012 Download Source Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Medicare Baseline, May 2013.
A new Kaiser Family Foundation survey about the U.S. role in global health finds the public puts meeting basic needs such as improving access to clean water and food and helping children at the top of the priority list for U.S. global health spending.
This paper presents data on Medicaid spending during the years leading up to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It uses administrative data to first examine overall spending trends and trends by service type. We then draw on additional data to analyze per enrollee spending growth during this period, both by service type and by eligibility group, to understand what drove Medicaid spending.
In this JAMA Health Forum column, Larry Levitt highlights how the Make America Healthy Again agenda aimed at chronic disease does little to address the affordability of health care and that efforts to lower federal spending on health care may worsen the problem, raising out-of-pocket costs for many people with Medicaid and Affordable Care Act…
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.
KFF's Health Tracking Poll looks at awareness and perceived impact of the tax and budget law signed by Trump in July 2025. Nearly half of the public says that they expect the new law to generally hurt them and their families, about twice the share who say it will generally help. The law itself remains largely unpopular, with many more people holding unfavorable views than favorable ones.
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