Health Coverage in a Period of Rising Unemployment November 29, 2008 Issue Brief This policy brief reviews the public and private options available to help people maintain coverage if they become unemployed during a downturn and cannot get employer-sponsored coverage through a spouse. Specifically, it examines COBRA, non-group insurance and Medicaid. And it explains why, despite such options, more people will become uninsured…
Pulling it Together: 19.7 April 16, 2009 Perspective Several years ago Joanne Silberner from NPR offered some advice I liked. Joanne said that the secret to effective communication was to “have a killer anecdote and a killer number.” Here is a killer number: 19.7. That’s the average number of years between major attempts at health reform since Harry…
Pulling It Together: A Public Opinion Surprise April 4, 2011 Perspective Medicaid is the nation’s primary health insurance program for low-income people and people with disabilities, covering more than 60 million people this year. And it’s about to get a lot of attention: it’s likely to be a prime target for spending reductions by “deficit hawks” in debate over the budget;…
Implications Of A Federal Block Grant Program For Medicaid April 1, 2011 Issue Brief This issue brief examines the broad implications of converting Medicaid to block grant financing, one of several ideas that have been put forth to help reduce the federal deficit. The paper, which does not analyze any specific proposal, notes that switching to block grant financing would fundamentally alter the Medicaid…
Medicaid’s Role for Black Americans May 1, 2011 Fact Sheet This fact sheet examines Medicaid’s role for black Americans. It includes data on Medicaid’s coverage of black Americans and the program’s impact on their access to care, as well as the impacts of the recent recession and the coming expansion of Medicaid under health reform on enrollment in Medicaid among…
Enhanced Medicaid Match Rates Expire in June 2011 June 1, 2011 Fact Sheet This fact sheet discusses the role played by the enhanced federal Medicaid matching funds available to states through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), and the implications for state Medicaid programs as that extra assistance expires June 30, 2011. States used the ARRA enhanced Medicaid funding to…
Pulling It Together: Are We Headed for a Government Takeover of Health Care? July 29, 2011 Perspective Remember the “government takeover of the health care system” argument that critics of the health reform law have used? Well, last week the Office of the Actuary in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services published the latest projections of health spending in the journal Health Affairs. Attention focused mainly…
A Guide to the Supreme Court’s Review of the 2010 Health Care Reform Law January 30, 2012 Issue Brief With the Supreme Court preparing to hear oral arguments about challenges to the 2010 Affordable Care Act in March 2012, this Kaiser Family Foundation brief serves as a primer on the pending case, which challenges the constitutionality both of the law’s individual mandate that requires most Americans to obtain health…
Snapshots: Health Benefit Offer Rates and Employee Earnings November 15, 2010 Issue Brief Employer-provided health insurance is the primary source of insurance coverage in the United States, covering almost 160 million people.1 About 90 percent of the non-elderly privately-insured population is covered by employer-sponsored plans, meaning that employer decisions about whether to offer health benefits will influence overall rates of insurance coverage in the…
Medicaid and CHIP Coverage In An Era of Recession and Health Reform December 31, 2010 Event Despite tight budgets, nearly all states maintained or made targeted expansions or improvements in their Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Programs (CHIP) eligibility and enrollment rules in 2010, preserving the programs’ important role of providing coverage to millions of low-income Americans who otherwise lack affordable options. This stability in large…