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The Impact of Recent Changes in Health Care Coverage for Low-Income People: A First Look at the Research Following Changes in Oregon's Medicaid Program Oregon recently restructured its Medicaid program through a Section 1115 waiver and other program changes, largely in response to particularly difficult state budget problems.
This paper provides a targeted review of Tennessee's experience providing health care to individuals with special needs under TennCare, its Medicaid managed care initiative. The first part reviews the experience of TennCare Partners, the behavioral health carve-out program created in 1996. The second part reviews how TennCare's structure affects the disabled and chronically ill.
In 2002, the state of Washington eliminated state-funded Medicaid look-alike coverage for certain immigrant families. These families then became eligible for more limited coverage in the state's Basic Health program. This report details the process of this transition and the outcomes for coverage and access for these individuals. Research Brief (.
This brief highlights low-income workers and the impact of ACA coverage expansions on this population. Low-income workers may not have access to jobs that provide full-time, full-year employment or jobs with comprehensive benefit packages, including health insurance. Medicaid plays an important role in providing health coverage for low-income workers, and coverage expansions implemented under the ACA have produced substantial coverage gains for low-income workers and a corresponding reduction in the uninsured. However, low-income workers in non-expansion states with incomes too high for Medicaid but too low for subsidies in the Marketplace do not have an affordable coverage option and will likely remain uninsured.
This report examines an approach to reforming Medicare that has been a focus of Congressional hearings and featured in several broader debt reduction and entitlement reform proposals, and was included in the June 2016 House Republican health plan. The analysis models four different options for modifying Medicare's benefit design, all of which include a single deductible, modified cost-sharing requirements, a new cost-sharing limit, and a prohibition on first-dollar Medigap coverage. The analysis models the expected effects on out-of-pocket spending by beneficiaries in traditional Medicare, and assesses how each option is expected to affect spending by the federal government, state Medicaid programs, employers, and other payers, assuming full implementation in 2018.
Revamping traditional Medicare’s benefit design and restricting “first-dollar” supplemental coverage could reduce federal spending, simplify cost sharing, protect against high medical costs, decrease out-of-pocket spending for many beneficiaries, and provide more help to those with low incomes -- but would be unlikely to achieve all of these goals simultaneously.
This brief examines family budgets of Medicaid enrollees, how health care costs fit into these budgets, and views on how potential changes to health care could affect them based on 21 interviews with Medicaid enrollees in five cities.
Medicare provides significant health and financial protections to more than 60 million Americans, but there are gaps in coverage and high cost-sharing requirements that can make health care difficult to afford. This report analyzes several policy options that could help make health care more affordable for people covered by Medicare, especially beneficiaries with relatively low incomes: adding an out-of-pocket limit to traditional Medicare, adding a hard out-of-pocket cap to Part D, expanding financial assistance through the Medicare Savings Programs, and expanding financial assistance through the Part D low-income subsidy program.
A new Kaiser Family Foundation brief and interactive map provide the latest national and state-level estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau of the share and number of people ages 65 and older who are living in poverty.
The number of uninsured people rose by nearly 700,000, to 27.4 million people, in 2017, reversing some of the coverage gains achieved under the Affordable Care Act, according to latest analysis of uninsured data by KFF (the Kaiser Family Foundation).
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