Reports Examine Medicaid; New Web Site Features Health Disparities Data

• "Commonwealth Fund Health Care Opinion Leaders Survey," Commonwealth Fund: Most respondents of the survey support policies that would build upon Medicaid as a way to improve the U.S. health safety net system. In particular, 95% of participants say they favor policies that would simplify enrollment and eligibility, while 85% say they support federal funding that would expand coverage to all uninsured people with annual incomes below 150% of the poverty level. Commentary pieces from Commonwealth Fund President Karen Davis; Diane Rowland, executive vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation and executive director of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured; National Governors Association Executive Director Ray Sheppach; and Sandra Shewry, director of the California Department of Health Services, accompany the survey (Commonwealth Fund release, 10/6).
  
  
• Factline.org, Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved: The new Web site, a project of the journal and funded by the National Library of Medicine, aims to present data from scholarly research on health disparities for journalists, students, community workers and policy makers (Meharry Medical College release, 10/5).
  
  
• "Medicaid -- Implications for the Health Safety Net," New England Journal of Medicine: The perspective piece -- by Diane Rowland, executive vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation and executive director of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured -- examines Medicaid's "growing role" in the U.S. health safety net and how increasing costs and "state budgetary pressures" have made the program "a target for reform that could fundamentally reshape" it. Rowland writes that the situation reveals a "more fundamental debate about how we as a nation fill the gaps in our health care system to provide and finance care for the poorest and sickest among us" (Rowland, NEJM, 10/6).