Filling the need for trusted information on national health issues
Health Affairs Article: Florida's Medicaid Reform: Informed Consumer Choice?Florida's Medicaid reform program aims to encourage consumer choice and market competition by giving health plans new authority to vary benefits and having enrollees choose among the different plans. However, about three in 10 enrollees were not aware that they needed to…
Florida Medicaid Reform Waiver: Early Findings and Current StatusThis policy brief provides an overview of the Florida Medicaid reform and a summary of available research findings to date from various evaluators of the program. It was issued at the same time as a separate Health Affairs article highlighting findings from…
Trends in Access to Care Among Working-Age Adults, 1997-2006This policy brief finds about 39 million working-age adults nationally reported cost as a barrier to receiving needed health care in 2006, a number that grew by an average of 1 million people annually over the decade studied. Uninsured working-aged adults experienced…
2008 Update on Consumers’ Views of Patient Safety and Quality InformationAn updated examination of consumers’ views on health care quality information reveals major challenges remain in providing the public with comparative quality information and encouraging its use. The 2008 Update on Consumers’ Views of Patient Safety and Quality Information finds…
This policy brief examines the underlying shifts in health insurance coverage in 2007, which resulted in a 1.5 million decrease in the number of uninsured people under age 65, due to increased public coverage. This includes about 300,000 in Massachusetts, which implemented its comprehensive health reform that year. The brief…
The latest Kaiser Health Tracking Poll: Election 2008 finds that health care has crept up in importance as an election issue in recent months among a key voting group: political independents, who ranked it as highly as Democrats did in this poll. Roughly one in four (26%) independents rank health…
Trends in the health insurance marketplace show substantial growth in high deductible health plans, especially among smaller firms, where 35% of workers are now covered by plans with a deductible of $1,000 or more. That’s according to our recently released employer health benefits survey, which we have been conducting now…
Download PDF Key Facts on the Uninsured In 2007, 45 million nonelderly people in the United States lacked health coverage More than eight in ten uninsured people (81%) come from working families About two-thirds of the nonelderly uninsured are from low-income families (income below 200% of poverty, about $42,400 for…
The latest Kaiser Health Tracking Poll: Election 2008 poll finds that one in four (24%) Americans continues to struggle with paying for health care. Health care ranks as a “serious problem” above paying for food (18%), problems with debt (16%), and paying the rent or mortgage (15%) and below paying…
This study examines the current spending on care for the uninsured and projects additional medical spending if the population had health insurance coverage. The study finds that the uninsured will spend $30 billion out-of-pocket for health care in 2008 while receiving $56 billion in uncompensated care, three quarters of which…
