Featured Post
February 26, 2020
Last week LDI hosted a day-long conference on Medicare for All & Beyond. Our goal was to participate in one of today’s most pressing conversations in health care—how to expand health insurance to the 28 million people in the United States who are currently uninsured. We welcomed close to 300 people from across the spectrum to participate in this conversation, to consider the critical questions underlying today’s debate, and to look in depth at the challenges we face in expanding insurance coverage in our country. The conference gave us all plenty to mull over.
April 15, 2015
Today, on the tax filing deadline, we can safely say that the ACA did not wreak havoc during tax season. Yes, there were surprised taxpayers who had to return portions of their premium tax credits (because they earned more than they had projected). Yes, there were taxpayers who were surprised that they needed to pay the individual mandate penalty of $95 or 1 percent of income because they were uninsured. But by most accounts, the overall impact of the ACA on tax filing has been limited.
April 8, 2015
This Friday LDI is hosting Dr. Patrick Conway, Chief Medical Officer, Acting Principal Deputy Administrator and Deputy Administrator for Innovation and Quality at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). He’ll be delivering the Samuel P. Martin, III Memorial Lecture.
April 4, 2015
Cross-posted with the Field Clinic blog
Last week, 86% of the House of Representatives voted to repeal and replace the flawed Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula designed to limit the growth of Medicare physician payments. This remarkable show of bipartisanship indicates that a truly bad policy—one that no one was willing to implement—cannot survive forever. Since 2002, Congress has passed 17 short-term “doc fixes” to avoid the drastic cuts in Medicare payments that the SGR requires.
March 3, 2015
In an online commentary in JAMA Pediatrics, Mitesh Patel and Kevin Volpp comment on a new school-based randomized trial that tested whether increased food palatability, combined with choice architecture, improved the diet of elementary and middle school children.
A new study by LDI Senior Fellow Lawton Burns and colleagues challenges the conventional wisdom about the societal benefits and comparative advantages of integrated delivery networks (IDNs). A literature review and detailed analysis of financial and quality indicators found “scant evidence” of improved quality, lower cost per case, or greater societal benefit.
The Affordable Care Act again went on trial as the King v. Burwell case was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on March 4th. Challenging the authority of the Federal Government to issue health insurance premium subsidies on federally-facilitated marketplaces, the case is as complex as it is politically contentious. The Justices are scheduled to hand down their ruling in June. So here's our syllabus of required reading to help you make better sense of this landmark legal event.
March 7, 2015
Sunday, March 8th is International Women’s Day. Take part in the Twitter conversation with #womensday and #makeithappen
At the recent AcademyHealth National Health Policy Conference, experts offered their Affordable Care Act (ACA) “top five punch list”. A punch list, I learned, is a list of tasks that must be completed to satisfy the terms of a construction contract. In honor of International Women’s Day, I offer my own punch list—policy tasks I believe must be completed to satisfy the terms of a contract that legislators and leaders have—in theory—with women to ensure that the ACA delivers for them.
February 26, 2015
Stand-alone dental plans (SADPs), available on state and federal marketplaces, spawned headlines late last fall because they were mistakenly counted when CMS tallied the total of health insurance enrollments. Beyond that, dental coverage under the ACA, an essential benefit for children and an optional benefit for adults, has received little attention. A new Research Brief by the American Dental Association’s Health Policy Institute sheds more light on dental coverage in the marketplaces.
February 24, 2015
As a recipient of the Alice Hersh Scholarship, I had the privilege of attending AcademyHealth’s 2015 National Health Policy Conference in Washington D.C. In addition to many interesting sessions, I had the opportunity to meet many leaders in the health care space, from health services researchers and policy makers to providers and business leaders. One of the most interesting themes throughout the conference was the developments and innovations in the private sector.
Similar to recent moves by other national retail chains, Walgreens will continue its push towards being a major player in health care as described by Jeffrey Kang, Senior Vice President of Health and Wellness Services and Solutions. He noted Walgreens’ ability to deliver basic services, such as drug dispensing, health care clinics, and medical tests, in an affordable, fast, and convenient way, displaying agility that is often difficult to achieve in large health systems. According to Dr. Kang, Walgreens plans to play a larger role in chronic care in the coming years, a further step in moving health care outside of the traditional domains.
February 23, 2015
Twitter, as an indicator of public sentiment, has great potential in health research. A recent study linked Twitter negativity with rates of heart disease mortality on a county level; a new study links Twitter sentiments with state rates of enrollment on the ACA health insurance marketplaces in the first open enrollment period. It is important not to overreach, however, in taking correlations beyond the statistical links that they are. One critic notes that being angry on Twitter says nothing about your, or your community’s chances of actually getting heart disease.
February 14, 2015
Cross-posted with the Field Clinic blog
Health insurance is complicated. When you’re struggling to make ends meet, that means not getting coverage. When Governor Corbett released his Healthy PA plan as an “alternative” to a traditional expansion of the Medicaid program, it was laced with complexity. His determination to make it different from the existing Medicaid program meant creating new private insurance plans. These ended up being run by many of the same companies that were already administering the Medicaid program but now would have two entirely different sets of plans.
February 13, 2015
As the February 15 deadline for open enrollment on the ACA marketplaces approaches, surveys tells us that many uninsured people remain unaware or misinformed about whether they qualify for subsidies to help purchase health insurance. Prior to the ACA, many people looked to agents and brokers to understand their options and to help them find an individual plan.
But agents and brokers face obstacles in fully engaging in the marketplaces, as an RWJF/Urban Institute Issue Brief concluded from interviews with insurance professionals after the first open enrollment period. They reported obstacles such as IT issues, poor training, inadequate customer support, and difficulty being paid from state marketplaces. Further, the authors noted, agents and brokers tend to have minimal experience working with a low-income population, and may lack relationships with communities with historically low levels of insurance.