Financing

  The Public’s Health Care Agenda for the New President and Congress This survey captures the public’s attitudes regarding the health care agenda for President Obama and the new Congress in 2009. It assesses the relative priority placed on health care by the American public as part of addressing the…

UPDATED: An updated version of this analysis is now available online. Recent policy debate has focused on the issue of rising health care costs and whether it might be possible to control costs by requiring consumers to pay a larger share of their health care costs out of pocket. While…

This analysis examines the potential costs and savings that the health reform law may generate for state budgets, a topic of great interest at a time when states continue to struggle with tight budgets in the wake of the recession. The analysis seeks to explain why recent state estimates of…

This brief examines the changes in the 2010 health reform law affecting the Medicare Advantage program, which gives beneficiaries the option of enrolling in private insurance plans for their Medicare benefits, instead of the traditional fee-for-service program. The reform law will gradually reduce Medicare payments to these plans to bring…

This data spotlight examines the coverage gap, or “doughnut hole,” in Medicare stand-alone drug plans available in 2010. While in the gap in coverage, Part D enrollees (other than those receiving low-income subsidies) are required to pay 100 percent of total drug costs until they reach the catastrophic coverage level.…

This brief describes how the new board created under the 2010 health reform law is expected to limit the growth in Medicare spending over time. Starting in 2014, if projected per capita Medicare spending exceeds targets set in the law, the board must recommend ways to reduce Medicare spending, while…

It’s no secret that the response to the HIV epidemic domestically has not kept pace with the response to the global epidemic. And in an earlier column called America Has Gone Quiet on HIV/AIDS I wrote about the growing complacency towards the domestic epidemic revealed in our recent survey of…

This survey, conducted jointly by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Pew Global Attitudes Project, examines how people around the world perceive and prioritize health in their countries and gauge the efforts of donor nations. People in 47 countries were polled on a series of health questions, giving them an…

This report examines Medicaid spending growth nationally during the last decade, with a focus on growth during the recession of 2007 to 2009. The recession-driven enrollment growth in recent years drove program spending to increase faster than national health spending overall, but on a per enrollee basis the growth in…

This brief summarizes key findings from the full collection of 2010 Part D Data Spotlights examining key trends in the private stand-alone drug plans available to Medicare beneficiaries. The spotlight is one in a series analyzing key aspects of the Medicare Part D drug plans that will be available to…