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The U.S. government has a long history of supporting global efforts to improve nutrition and is the largest donor to nutrition efforts in the world. This brief provides an overview of U.S. support for nutrition, including trends in funding and top country recipients and places the U.S. within the larger context of overall donor support for the sector.
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…
Medicaid payments to hospitals, which include base and supplemental payments, play an important role in hospital finances and can affect beneficiaries’ access to care.This brief provides an overview of Medicaid payments for hospitals and explores the implications of the ACA Medicaid expansion, including changes in uncompensated care, as well as payment policy changes on hospital finances.
The Affordable Care Act’s coverage expansions have benefited hospitals financially, helping to produce an overall decline nationwide in uncompensated care from $34.9 billion to $28.9 billion in 2014, according to a new analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Nearly all of the decline occurred in Medicaid expansion states, where uncompensated care costs were $10.8 billion in 2014 – down $5.7 billion, or 35 percent, from 2013, the year before ACA coverage expansions took full effect. The…
In this brief, we take stock of the U.S. global health response on the occasion of one year of the Trump Presidency and look ahead to the global health policy issues that are likely to be front and center in the coming months and years. We include a discussion of new KFF polling data (from January 2018) to provide an updated assessment of U.S. public support for global health programs.
The White House released its FY 2019 budget request to Congress on February 12, 2018, which includes significant cuts to global health programs compared to FY 2017 enacted levels (the overall levels in the request are similar to the FY 2018 budget request). Key highlights are as follows (see table for additional detail): Funding provided to the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) (through the Global Health Programs account), which represents the…
Six months after hurricanes Irma and Maria made landfall across Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, local officials described progress but also a long road to full recovery of the U.S. territories’ health care systems, economies and infrastructure during a public briefing Monday at the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Washington D.C. offices. An archived webcast of the 90-minute briefing on the status of the recovery on the islands, with a focus on their health care systems,…
Congress is currently debating the American Health Care Act (AHCA), which would repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and also make substantial changes to the structure and financing of Medicaid. Among other provisions, the AHCA would use a per capita cap policy to cap federal funds to states for Medicaid. This data note examines what the implications of tying per enrollee growth to CPI-M would have been for the 2001-2011 period for federal…
A new analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that the majority of states would have gotten less in federal Medicaid funding from 2001 to 2011 if Medicaid financing had been based on a per capita cap. The analysis looked at what would have happened if spending growth per Medicaid enrollee had been limited to growth in the medical care component of the Consumer Price Index (CPI-M) during that period. This spending growth limit is…
As policymakers in Washington discuss Affordable Care Act repeal and a possible block grant for Medicaid, a new issue brief from the Kaiser Family Foundation lays out key questions to consider in restructuring federal financing of the nation’s health insurance program for low-income Americans. Capping federal funding for Medicaid through a block grant or a per capita cap financing system would make federal spending more predictable and achieve federal budget savings. It also could be structured…
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