Affordable Care Act

This issue brief compares the financial alignment demonstrations for beneficiaries who are dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid in states that have memoranda of understanding approved by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

  With 17 million people newly-insured since 2014, Drew Altman’s latest column for The Wall Street Journal’s Think Tank takes a look at whether they will make an impact in the first presidential election since Affordable Care Act enrollment began. All previous columns by Drew Altman are online.

In this column for The Wall Street Journal’s Think Tank, Drew Altman takes a look at whether the 17 million people newly-insured since 2014 will make an impact in the first presidential election since Affordable Care Act enrollment began.

In thousands of medically underserved communities across the U.S., community health centers enroll low-income people in health coverage and provide care to millions of patients. Against the backdrop of significant health center expansion over several years and a full year of expanded health coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), this brief examines change between 2013 and 2014 in the volume and health coverage profile of health center patients, and health center enrollment activities and service capacity, comparing states that implemented the ACA Medicaid expansion in 2014 and states that did not expand Medicaid in 2014. The study is based on data from the federal Uniform Data System and a 2014 national survey of health centers.

This issue brief examines states’ approaches to administering wrap-around benefits and cost-sharing in long-standing Medicaid premium assistance programs and the information available to beneficiaries about how to access these program features.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires most private health insurance plans to provide coverage for a broad range of preventive services, including most contraceptives for women. This policy was at the center of a Supreme Court case brought forward by for-profit corporations (Hobby Lobby and Conestoga) that successfully claimed that the contraceptive coverage requirement violated their religious rights. Last month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear yet another challenge (Zubik v Burwell) to the contraceptive coverage requirement, this time brought by nonprofit corporations, claiming that the accommodation established by the federal government for religiously affiliated nonprofit employers with objections to contraception violates their religious rights.

With the recent governors’ elections in Kentucky and Louisiana refocusing attention on state Medicaid expansion decisions, a newly updated issue brief from the Kaiser Family Foundation provides an overview of the waivers obtained by six states – Arkansas, Iowa, Michigan, Indiana, New Hampshire and Montana — that are pursuing alternative Medicaid expansions under the Affordable Care Act.

In this issue of the Women’s Health Issues journal, Alina Salganicoff and Laurie Sobel discuss how the private insurance reforms and expansions in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have affected access to coverage for women and where gaps remain.

This Visualizing Health Policy infographic is based on a survey of primary care clinicians in early 2015 and delves into primary care practitioners’ (PCPs’) perspectives on recent changes to the health care delivery system.

The Kaiser Family Foundation’s Health Insurance Marketplace Calculator is now updated to include local data on 2016 health plans that are being sold through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces. The Spanish-language version of the calculator is also updated.