January 2022 | Coverage, Medicaid, Nurses & More

Congress considers building on the Affordable Care Act as Marketplace enrollment for the 2022 plan year begins robustly.

In the face of perennially high suicide rates, Utah’s health system leaders and community advocates work together to stem the tide.

US health care spending increased 9.7 percent to reach $4.1 trillion in 2020, a much faster rate than the 4.3 percent increase seen in 2019. The acceleration in 2020 was due to a 36.0 percent increase in federal expenditures for health care that occurred ...

In US health policy, conventional wisdom holds that market competition and price regulation are mutually exclusive strategies to stem high and rising provider prices. This incorrect assumption centers on the belief that robust competition in US commercial ...

Low family income is associated with worse child academic achievement. Little is known about how health insurance expansions affect children’s achievement in low-income households. This study examined the effects of the Affordable Care Act’s coverage ...

Racial and ethnic disparities in adults’ access to dental care have persisted for decades. We examined how recent Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansions that included coverage of dental services for adults affected racial and ethnic disparities in dental ...

Distance traveled to a provider has been associated with access to and timely use of health care services. Medicaid expansion has been previously linked to an increase in the number of providers accepting Medicaid patients. We hypothesized that by ...

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansion increased Medicaid eligibility for low-income adults regardless of their pregnancy or parental status. Variation in states’ adoption of this expansion created a natural experiment to study the effects of ...

The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 enables states to lengthen eligibility for pregnancy-related Medicaid coverage from the current sixty days after birth to up to one year, a time when mothers remain at elevated pregnancy-related health risk. Using ...

Analysis of Current Population Survey data suggests a tightening labor market for registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, and nursing assistants, marked by falling employment and rising wages through June 2021. Unemployment rates remain higher in ...

The US is experiencing a shortage of primary care providers, which could be reduced by the addition of nurse practitioners. However, the ability to increase the supply of nurse practitioners is limited by a shortage of clinical preceptors. The Affordable ...

More than thirty years since the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), people with disability continue to experience health care disparities. The ADA mandates that patients with disability receive reasonable accommodations. In our survey ...

Informal care, or care provided by family and friends, is the most common form of care received by community-dwelling older adults with functional limitations. However, less is known about informal care provision within residential care settings including ...

In 2016 Medicare introduced advance care planning Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes to reimburse clinicians for time spent providing the service. Despite recent increases, use of these codes remains low for reasons incompletely captured by ...

Little is publicly known about coverage denials for medical services that do not meet medical necessity criteria. We characterized the extent of these denials and their key features, using Medicare Advantage claims for a large insurer from the period 2014–...

We tested the impact of personalized telephone calls from service center representatives on health plan enrollment in California’s Affordable Care Act Marketplace, Covered California, using a randomized controlled trial. The study sample included 79,522 ...

Medicare’s Accountable Care Organization (ACO) Investment Model (AIM) provided up-front funding to forty-one small, rurally located ACOs to encourage their participation in the Medicare Shared Savings Program. We estimate net savings to Medicare of $381.5 ...

A mother whose son was stillborn at thirty-six weeks is working to import stillbirth prevention policies from abroad.