Retiree Health VEBAs: A New Twist On An Old Paradigm February 27, 2009 Issue Brief This issue brief provides an overview of stand-alone Voluntary Employees’ Beneficiary Association trusts, through which employers have been able to rid themselves of future obligations to pay retiree health benefits in exchange for making a significant payment to designed to approximate the projected cost of these benefits. The paper include…
Snapshots from the Kitchen Table: Family Budgets and Health Care February 1, 2009 Video This Kaiser Family Foundation documentary, “Snapshots from the Kitchen Table: Family Budgets and Health Care,” profiles several American families who are struggling to make ends meet. It depicts the narrow financial ledge on which millions of low- and middle- income working households stand even in normal economic times, and illustrates…
Rethinking Medicaid’s Financing Role for Medicare Enrollees January 31, 2009 Issue Brief This issue brief examines coverage of the nearly 9 million “dual eligible” beneficiaries, the low-income elderly and persons with disabilities who are enrolled in both Medicare and Medicaid. It explores the national and state impacts of shifting the financing of selected services for dual eligibles from Medicaid to Medicare, including…
Reports Analyze Cost and Coverage of People Eligible for Both Medicaid and Medicare and Options for Reforming Financing of Their Care January 31, 2009 Issue Brief These issue briefs examine coverage of the nearly 9 million “dual eligibles,” the low-income elderly and persons with disabilities who are enrolled in both Medicare and Medicaid. The reports explore the national and state impacts of shifting the financing of selected services for dual eligibles from Medicaid to Medicare, and…
Pulling it Together from Drew Altman: Multiple Agendas for Controlling Health Care Costs January 26, 2009 Perspective In what would be a domestic policy trifecta, we may be headed for interconnected big debates about economic recovery, entitlement programs and health reform. A core issue in the entitlement and health reform debates is the problem of rising health care costs. President Obama, now apparently fully briefed on the…
Revisiting ‘Skin in the Game’ Among Medicare Beneficiaries: An Updated Analysis of the Increasing Financial Burden of Health Care Spending From 1997 to 2005 January 20, 2009 Issue Brief This issue brief presents an analysis of the financial burden of out-of-pocket health care spending for Medicare beneficiaries between 1997 and 2005. The analysis shows median out-of-pocket spending as a share of Medicare beneficiaries’ income increased between 1997 and 2005, from 11.9 percent to 16.1 percent. For some beneficiaries, the spending burden was even greater, with 25 percent of people on Medicare spending nearly one-third or more of their income on health care.
Medicare 101 Tutorial January 1, 2009 Interactive This tutorial was produced for kaiserEDU.org, a Kaiser Family Foundation website that ceased production in September 2013. The kaiserEDU.org tutorials are no longer being updated but have been made available on kff.org due to demand by professors who are using the tutorials in class assignments. You may search for other tutorials to…
Toplines — The Public’s Health Care Agenda for the New President and Congress December 31, 2008 Poll Finding Toplines — The Public’s Health Care Agenda for the New President and CongressThis document contains the detailed toplines from The Public’s Health Care Agenda for the New President and Congress poll. The poll involved a nationally representative random sample of 1,628 adults ages 18 and older who were interviewed by…
Chartpack — The Public’s Health Care Agenda for the New President and Congress December 31, 2008 Poll Finding Chartpack — The Public’s Health Care Agenda for the New President and CongressThis chartpack provides the key findings from the survey of the public’s attitudes regarding the health care agenda for President Obama and the new Congress in 2009. It assesses the relative priority placed on health care by the…
Primers on Key Health Care Topics and Programs December 1, 2008 Issue Brief The Kaiser Family Foundation maintains a number of primers providing overviews of key health care programs and issues. Written by Foundation staff, each primer provides key data and information that helps illustrate the topic and its relevance for the nation’s health care system. Medicaid: A Primer Medicare: A Primer The…