The independent source for health policy research, polling, and news.
Melanie Bella heads the new federal office that seeks to help people whose coverage is often fragmented because they qualify for both programs and to save the government money by streamlining that coverage.
Nearly a year after passage of the health care overhaul law, barely half of Americans know the law remains intact, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll shows.
As Congress wrestles with medical liability reform, more than 40 years of experience with California’s cap on non-economic damages offers evidence that this approach is an effective way to achieve the goal of reducing health care costs while preserving sufficient deterrence in the legal system.
As challenges to the health law’s individual mandate wind their way through the courts, it is important to focus on the real question: what happens to the health law if this provision is ultimately struck down?
Congress took great pains to ensure that the penalty imposed on people who don’t get health insurance was not called a tax in the health law. This could make it tough for the Justice Department to argue that it is a tax.
Few options are available for the 42,000 people losing coverage.
The public employee backlash against Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to help balance the state’s budget by imposing higher health care and pension co-pays is spreading across the nation, as newly-elected conservative governors seek to roll back benefits granted during better economic times.
House Republicans have come up with more than half a dozen ways to throttle spending on overhaul. Democrats in the Senate can block them, and President Obama still wields the veto pen.
House Republicans passed measures to defund implementation of the health law, while the Obama administration fires back, rescinding a regulation they say could jeopardize patient access to care. Watch the video.
The Obama administration is dispatching aides to states to offer advice on holding down spending on the program for the poor.
As part of legislation to keep the government funded through March 4, House Republicans passed a series of amendments aimed at defunding implementation of the health care law. Separately, the Obama administration rescinded part of a 2008 conscience clause regulation they said could impact patients’ access to medical care.
Religious exemptions that allow health care workers to decline certain services to patients if they have a religious exemption should not include contraception. That’s the bottom line of the administration’s new regulations on the “conscience clause.”
Those who believe the health law is unconstitutional have a solemn obligation not to implement it.
20 percent of Medicare patients are back in the hospital within 30 days, a trend that endangers patients and raises health costs.
Some patient advocates, as well as the nursing home industry, object to using managed care for such vulnerable patients, but health plans say they can provide quality services while holding down costs.
The Lone Star State isn’t seeking to opt out of Medicaid anymore, but it’s joining other states in pressing Washington for more flexibility in running the program.
In addition to shifting nearly all Medicaid patients to HMOs and other managed care, the Senate’s proposal would cap spending, require plans to bid for business and impose $100 fees on patients who abuse the emergency room.
Federal officials are walking a fine line trying to satisfy the demands of budget-strapped governors who want to cut their Medicaid programs.
The conservative group FreedomWorks recommends a system of vouchers to replace Medicare, Medicaid and provisions of the new health law.
Jackie Judd of the Kaiser Family Foundation is joined by Mary Agnes Carey of Kaiser Health News and David Nather of Politico to talk about the president’s 2012 proposed budget and a House bill that would repeal a provision of the health care overhaul that small businesses find particularly onerous.
