Pre-Existing Conditions

One health care issue about which the presidential candidates acknowledge they have differences is how the health care system should treat people with pre-existing health conditions. People who have a health condition (such as an illness or pregnancy) or who are at higher than average risk of needing health care…

As the Supreme Court hears cases challenging the constitutionality of parts of the Affordable Care Act, a relatively small share of the public thinks the Supreme Court’s decision will have a lot of impact on their family (28 percent). At the same time, the public is divided as to whether…

As the country gears up for implementation of the major provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), June’s Kaiser Health Tracking Poll takes a step back and examines views on health insurance more broadly among some key subgroups, including young adults, the uninsured, and those with pre-existing conditions. The poll finds that the large majority of Americans want and value health insurance.

With the focus now mainly on exchanges, Medicaid expansions, and enrolling the uninsured in newly available coverage arrangements, there is less attention lately to the ACA insurance reforms which have always been the most popular parts of the law – changes which could affect every American’s insurance in some way…

For more than 35 years, many states operated high-risk pool programs to offer non-group health coverage to uninsurable residents. The federal government also operated a temporary high-risk pool program established under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to provide coverage to people with pre-existing conditions in advance of when broader insurance market changes took effect in 2014. This issue brief reviews the history of these programs to provide context for some of the potential benefits and challenges of a high-risk pool.

In this post for JAMA, the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Larry Levitt outlines the health care platforms of the Republican and Democratic parties, noting their fundamentally different aims and differing ideas about, among other things, the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) and Medicare.

In 2018, three Medicare Part D plan sponsors—UnitedHealth, Humana, and CVS Health—account for more than half of the program’s 43 million Part D enrollees (55%) and two-thirds of all stand-alone drug plan enrollees, indicating a marketplace that is dominated by a handful of major insurers, according to a new Kaiser…

The July 2018 Kaiser Health Tracking Poll finds that a candidate’s position on continuing coverage for pre-existing conditions tops voters’ list of priorities when it comes to who they’ll vote for in the 2018 midterms. Additionally, 6 in 10 Americans say President Trump and his administration are trying to make the Affordable Care Act fail, and about half say that this is a bad thing.

Half in Non-Expansion States Support Their State Expanding Medicaid; More if Tied to Work Requirements With less than four months to go until the Congressional midterm general election, a candidate’s position on continuing protections for people with pre-existing health conditions is at the forefront of the many health care issues…

In an Axios column, Drew Altman analyzes the narrowing gap between growth in health spending and GDP and discusses why it matters. The big question, he says, is will the narrowing have staying power?