state budgets

Here’s what states get when they expand Medicaid: more savings, more revenue, more jobs, more access to care for their communities. That’s the conclusion from a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation issue brief released this month that compared the differences between states that chose to expand Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act and those that opted out. Under the health reform law, the federal government will pay the entire cost of expanding state Medicaid programs up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level through 2016, phasing down to 90 percent by 2020. It’s a pretty good…
For public health workers, it’s no surprise that social, economic and political conditions shape the distribution and burden of disease. They’ve always known that it takes much more than medicine to keep people healthy. Still, when public health scientist Kristina Talbert-Slagle decided to study the impact of social and public health spending on HIV/AIDS, she wasn’t sure what she’d uncover. “We thought that maybe there would be a connection, but we didn’t really know what to expect,” said Talbert-Slagle, a senior scientific officer at the Yale Global Health Leadership Institute and a lecturer…