Research Roundup: Payday Loans; Human Trafficking; And How Psychopaths See The World
Each week, KHN compiles a selection of recently released health policy studies and briefs.
Health Affairs:
From Payday Loans To Pawnshops: Fringe Banking, The Unbanked, And Health
This research adds to the growing evidence that connects specific kinds of household debt and financial exclusion to poor health. Effectively addressing the health consequences of fringe borrowing and being unbanked will likely require expanding social welfare programs and labor protections. Future research should explore in more depth how the two-tier US financial system—one for the wealthy and one for the poor—affects health and worsens health inequities. (Eisenberg-Guyot, Firth, Klawitter and Hajat, 3/1)
Annals of Internal Medicine:
Engaging Survivors Of Human Trafficking: Complex Health Care Needs And Scarce Resources
For interventions to be effective in this marginalized population, challenges in engaging survivors in long-term therapeutic primary and mental health care must be better understood and overcome. This article uses the socioecological model of public health to identify barriers to engagement; offers evidence- and practice-based recommendations for overcoming these barriers; and proposes an interdisciplinary call to action for developing more flexible, adaptable models of care.(Judge et al., 3/13)
Urban Institute:
Updated: The Potential Impact Of Short-Term Limited-Duration Policies On Insurance Coverage, Premiums, And Federal Spending
The expansion of short-term limited-duration policies implied in the current administration’s proposed
rule has significant implications, particularly for insurance coverage and premiums in the remaining
ACA-compliant insurance market. We estimate that ACA-compliant private nongroup coverage would
fall by 2.2 million people in 2019 from the expansion of STLD policies alone, exacerbating the nongroup
market decline of 5.5 million people already anticipated in 2019 because of the elimination of the
individual-mandate penalties and other policy changes made since early 2017. (Blumberg, Buettgens and Wang, 3/14)
Heritage Foundation:
Bailouts Will Not Bring Lasting Stability To The Health Insurance Market
While there might be value in risk-mitigation programs such as reinsurance or high-risk pools, such programs are best applied in the context of larger efforts to stabilize the market by repealing and replacing the Obamacare provisions responsible for destabilization. ... Some might argue that funding the cost-sharing reductions could help to offset increasing costs in premiums subsidies but like funding for reinsurance, such efforts are not a response to the underlying problems of the law that fuel these increased costs: They are merely a patch that masks the real problems. (Owcharenko Schaefer, 3/7)
