Access to Affordable Dental Care: Gaps for Low-Income Adults June 1, 2012 Issue Brief This policy brief provides data and analysis of coverage and access to oral health care for low-income nonelderly adults. Lack of resources to pay for dental services, either through dental insurance or out-of-pocket, is a major barrier to oral health care for many low-income Americans. The problem is particularly acute…
Children and Oral Health: Assessing Needs, Coverage and Access June 1, 2012 Issue Brief This policy brief highlights the prevalence of dental problems among children and examines gaps in oral health coverage and access to dental care, as well as disparities by income and race/ethnicity. It also looks at out-of-pocket costs for dental care, explains the role of Medicaid and CHIP in dental care,…
Oral Health in the U.S.: Key Facts June 1, 2012 Fact Sheet This fact sheet provides data on oral health care coverage and access for children, nonelderly adults and Medicaid beneficiaries, including state-by-state data on measures such as the share of adults who have had a dental visit within the past year. Fact Sheet (.pdf)
Cost and Access Challenges: A Comparison of Experiences Between Uninsured and Privately Insured Adults Aged 55 to 64 with Seniors on Medicare May 30, 2012 Report This analysis looks at the difficulties uninsured people ages 55-64 have accessing and affording health care in 2010. Four in 10 of these near-seniors report having unmet health care needs or delaying treatment, while three in 10 uninsured near-seniors lived in families reporting problems paying their medical bills largely due…
Quick Take: Timing Matters: States Waiting for a Supreme Court Decision to Plan an Exchange May 23, 2012 Fact Sheet State-based health insurance exchanges are an important component of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) designed to extend subsidized private health insurance coverage to millions of Americans by 2014. Though projections show exchange enrollment could grow to 20 million individuals nationally, aggressive planning on the part of states…
Kaiser Health Tracking Poll — May 2012 May 2, 2012 Poll Finding The May Health Tracking Poll focuses on the public’s perceptions and reactions to women’s reproductive health reemerging as a heated issue in policy debates and news and its potential impact on the upcoming presidential election. Three in ten women (31 percent) overall believe that there is currently a “wide-scale effort…
Massachusetts Health Care Reform: Six Years Later May 1, 2012 Issue Brief In 2006, then-Gov. Mitt Romney signed Massachusetts’ comprehensive health reform designed to provide near-universal health insurance coverage for state residents. Building on a long history of health reform efforts, the state embarked on an ambitious plan to promote shared individual, employer, and government responsibility. This brief examines Massachusetts’ experience with…
The Massachusetts Health Care Landscape May 1, 2012 Fact Sheet This fact sheet summarizes the Massachusetts health care landscape, including data on demographics, population health, the uninsured and the state Medicaid program. Fact Sheet (.pdf)
States Getting a Jump Start on Health Reform’s Medicaid Expansion April 2, 2012 Issue Brief One of the primary goals of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is to decrease the number of uninsured through a Medicaid expansion to nearly all individuals with incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) ($14,856 for an individual or $25,390 for a family of three in…
Implementing Health Reform in the States March 27, 2012 Event The Alliance for Health Reform, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Association of Health Care Journalists sponsored this live webinar on March 27, 2012, to take a look at what’s happening in the states with implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Many of the key decisions implementing…