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Over the 10-year lifetime of a Medicare program aimed at reducing hospital readmissions, 93% of eligible hospitals have been penalized at least once. Hospital readmissions have become less frequent, and most experts attribute that partly to the financial threat of the penalties, though other factors likely contributed to the improvements.
In this commentary for Barron's, Cynthia Cox explores the impact to the American public as the U.S. health insurance system adjusts to the COVID-19 pandemic. She uses the experience of the past year and a half to raise questions about broader issues of fairness in the distribution of health care costs in the country.
A surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations among people who have not been vaccinated in August is adding billions of dollars in preventable costs to the nation’s health-care system, an updated KFF analysis finds. In August, the new analysis estimates that the preventable costs of treating unvaccinated patients in hospitals total $3.
August 25, 2021 – THE CONVERSATION / LA CONVERSACIÓN expands to address questions about the COVID-19 vaccines and children with new FAQ videos featuring pediatricians. This installment of the campaign is produced by KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation) under its Greater Than COVID public information response and is presented with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).
This analysis finds nearly three quarters of the largest health plans in each state are no longer waiving enrollees’ cost-sharing requirements for COVID-19 treatment as of August 2021. Insurers largely waived those costs early in the pandemic, before safe and effetive vaccines were available.
This analysis finds hospital admissions remained below expected levels in early 2021, suggesting much of the care people put off during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic may have been forgone altogether.
In this Axios column, Drew Altman unpacks President Biden’s recent executive order on promoting competition, exploring its significance for new efforts to control health costs by addressing consolidation in the health care industry.
New federal financial incentives for Medicaid expansion and the increased reliance on Medicaid as a coverage safety net during the pandemic have renewed debate in the 12 states that have not adopted the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act.
This literature review report summarizes evidence from nearly 200 studies on the effects of Medicaid expansion published between February 2020 and March 2021. These studies generally find beneficial impacts of expansion across a range of areas.
KHN and Gray Television’s InvestigateTV team joined forces to dig into the underlying reasons why strokes are a deadlier threat across most counties in Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, rural regions that are characterized by high rates of poverty, vulnerable elderly populations, a shortage of medical providers and an epidemic of local hospital closures.
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