Affordable Care Act
kkrisberg | April 4, 2014When Brian Castrucci sees signs up at local retailers offering discounts to police officers and firefighters, he thinks: Why not public health too?
“How do we better brand ourselves as those who protect and serve,” asks Castrucci, chief program and strategy officer at the de Beaumont Foundation, which supports a variety of projects aimed at strengthening the nation’s public health system. “I’ve never been a victim of crime, but I still value the police. I’ve never had a fire in my home, but I still value the fire department. …I want people to value prevention. I want people to know (public…
lborkowski | April 1, 2014Yesterday was the end of the first open enrollment period for people buying private health insurance plans on the federal and state-run health insurance exchanges. President Obama announced today that more than seven million people enrolled in private plans, helped by a surge of signups in the few days before the deadline. Many of these enrollees (those with incomes between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level) were able to get subsidies to decrease their premium costs.
Severe technical problems plagued Healthcare.gov -- the federally run site where residents of states not creating…
lborkowski | March 20, 2014On Tuesday, more than 40 activists were arrested while protesting Georgia Governor Nathan Deal's refusal to accept the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion. Janel Davis and Chris Joyner write in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Dr. Raphael Warnock of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was pastor, was among those placed in handcuffs by Georgia State Patrol troopers. Warnock and a group of supporters staged a sit-in outside of Deal’s office Tuesday afternoon. They were arrested without incident and led away as the remaining crowd of protesters sang “We Shall Not…
kkrisberg | February 7, 2014Higher insurance rates don’t mean people stop seeking care at publically funded health centers, found a recent study of family planning clinics in Massachusetts. The findings speak to serious concerns within public health circles that policy-makers may point to higher insurance rates as a justification to cut critical public health funding.
Published in the Jan. 24 issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the study examines trends among uninsured patients seeking care at Massachusetts health centers that receive Title X Family Planning Program funds. (The federal Title X program…
lborkowski | January 27, 2014I wrote last week about the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which the Affordable Care Act (ACA) created to invest in improving overall population health – with the hope that improved health will help slow the growth of healthcare costs. Another provision of the ACA that aims to reduce future healthcare costs is “Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Programs” (Section 2951). Three studies published in the latest supplemental issue of the American Journal of Public Health address this type of program.
Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) programs send…
lborkowski | January 21, 2014Both houses of Congress have now passed, and President Obama has signed, the omnibus spending bill, and it’s a welcome relief from budget battles through the end of this fiscal year (September 30, 2014). I was especially curious to see what the bill contained for the Prevention and Public Health Fund, an important part of the Affordable Care Act that has suffered under previous budget manuevering.
Section 4002 of the Affordable Care Act established the Prevention and Public Health Fund "to provide for expanded and sustained national investment in prevention and public health programs to…
kkrisberg | January 8, 2014With so much pressure on the Affordable Care Act to immediately live up to high expectations, and with opponents who seem gleeful at the news that Americans are having a hard time signing up for affordable health care, it’s reassuring to read that the health reform law can readily take a few blows and keep moving forward.
In a December analysis released by the Urban Institute, authors Linda Blumberg and John Holahan write that the “Affordable Care Act is unlikely to suffer long-term damage even if the marketplaces experience low enrollment and some adverse selection in the first year.” (…
lborkowski | January 6, 2014Now that it’s 2014, millions more people in the US have health insurance coverage (either Medicaid or private insurance), thanks to the Affordable Care Act. In the weeks ahead, many of the newly insured will be visiting healthcare providers to address ongoing health concerns. The Washington Post’s Sandhya Somashekhar and Karen Tumulty highlighted one person with a pent-up demand for healthcare, Sharon Kelly of Louisville, Kentucky:
Kelly said that having Medicaid coverage on Jan. 1 “is a huge relief,” adding, “I’m a redhead and I used to live in California. I have things on my skin that are…
lborkowski | December 23, 2013While we’re on vacation, we’re re-posting content from earlier in the year. This post was originally published on July 23, 2013.
By Celeste Monforton
My mailbox today contained an example that Obamacare is working for healthcare consumers. In an envelope from my health insurance provider was a check for $124.08. The cover letter from Humana explained it was a rebate of a portion of my premium, as required by the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) Medical Loss Ratio standard.
Under the law, health insurers are required to report to HHS's Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) how income…
lborkowski | December 10, 2013A coalition of public-health organizations, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, has released a report criticizing most U.S. states for under-investing in smoking prevention and cessation. Broken Promises to Our Children: The 1998 State Tobacco Settlement 15 Years Later calculates that states over the past 15 years, states have collected a total of $391 billion from tobacco settlements and tobacco taxes, but spent only 2.3% of that amount on tobacco prevention programs.
The report compares states’ tobacco-prevention expenditures to the levels…
lborkowski | December 2, 2013by Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA
President Obama's health reform has been derailed in a collision with health insurance software, but this is hardly a unique experience. In 1995, I was invited to Prague to try to help the Czech Republic reconcile two co-existing public health practice cultures–the hygiene police of the Soviet era and the German tradition of social medicine.
Our delegation found another crisis in the works, around the creation of private health insurance that had started in 1990. Payroll deductions bought private health insurance that covered basic physician and hospital service.…
lborkowski | November 27, 2013Wonkblog's Sarah Kliff has helpfully compiled "A guide to surviving Obamacare debates at Thanksgiving," and it starts off with a good one: "Your mom wants to know whether Obamacare is a total disaster." Kliff's response focuses on the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov, the online marketplace that was supposed to allow for easy health-insurance enrollment for people who need to get coverage. With the website improving but by no means problem-free, the enrollment numbers so far are dismally low. Kliff points out that some states that built their own online marketplaces have successfully…
lborkowski | November 19, 2013I've written before about the importance of the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion and about the role of community health centers in delivering primary care to underserved patients. With roughly half of the states declining the now-optional Medicaid expansion and an uncertain federal funding environment, though, the extent to which health centers will be able to serve the newly insured is up in the air. A new report from the Geiger Gibson/RCHN Community Health Foundation Research Collaborative puts some numbers on the variability. Under different Medicaid expansion and funding scenarios…
lborkowski | October 1, 2013Today is an exciting day in US healthcare history: For the first time, uninsured US residents can go online to shop for individual health insurance policies and feel confident of a few things: they can easily see information to make meaningful comparisons between plan options; they won’t be rejected or charged an astronomical rate based on their health history; and once they have a policy, they won’t be unpleasantly surprised by an omission of an essential benefit like hospital or maternity care.
In addition, insurance shoppers with incomes between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level…
lborkowski | September 18, 2013Earlier this week, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder signed legislation that accepts the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion for his state, and Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett has signaled his intention to do so if the federal government approves his proposed program changes. Wonkblog’s Sarah Kliff notes that if Pennsylvania does expand its Medicaid program, that will mean the majority of the states have adopted one of the main aspects of the Affordable Care Act. This is good news for the millions of low-income uninsured US residents who will gain health coverage from Medicaid.
Another…
lborkowski | August 12, 2013The Washington Post’s Lena H. Sun writes about Obamacare implementation, and finds that it differs greatly between Maryland and Virginia, which share a border but have very different attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act. Both have large uninsured populations (around 800,000 in Maryland and 844,000 in Virginia), but Virginia’s opposition to the law means it’s getting far less federal money and leaving its poorest residents with fewer options for affordable insurance coverage.
The lawmakers who wrote the ACA included two main ways to help those without employer-sponsored health insurance…
kkrisberg | July 26, 2013With immigration at the forefront of national debate, Jim Stimpson decided it was time to do a little more digging.
"There's a lot of rhetoric around immigrants' use of public services in general and health care specifically, and I thought with impending federal immigration reform it would be useful to have some sort of contribution about the facts of unauthorized immigrants' use of health services in the United States," said Stimpson, a professor within the University of Nebraska's School of Public Health and director of the university's Center for Health Policy.
So together with colleagues…
cmonforton | July 23, 2013My mailbox today contained an example that Obamacare is working for healthcare consumers. In an envelope from my health insurance provider was a check for $124.08. The cover letter from Humana explained it was a rebate of a portion of my premium, as required by the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) Medical Loss Ratio standard.
Under the law, health insurers are required to report to HHS's Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) how income from premium dollars are spent. (The first year of reporting was 2011 with the previous year's spending data.) For individual and small group plans…
lborkowski | June 27, 2013When the Supreme Court released its United States v. Windsor decision striking the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act yesterday, supporters of marriage equality felt joy akin to what Affordable Care Act supporters felt a year ago when the Court released its decision upholding the healthcare law. Because the Justices dismissed Hollingsworth v. Perry, the case regarding California's Proposition 8, based on lack of standing rather than ruling on the constiutionality of state bans of same-sex marriage, the Court has effectively decided that states get to decide for themselves whether to allow same-sex…
lborkowski | February 15, 2013One of the less-noticed provisions of the Affordable Care Act is a requirement that pharmaceutical companies report to the Department of Health and Human Services the gifts and other payments they give to doctors and teaching hospitals -- and that HHS in turn make that information available to the public. (It's sometimes referred to as the "Physician Payment Sunshine Act," after legislation previously introduced in Congress by Senator Chuck Grassley.) Earlier this month, HHS released its final regulations to implement this provision. Beginning August 1, 2013, drug and device companies will…