May 4th 2024
This week, the Center on Health Equity and Access highlights a variety of gaps that exist in health care, spanning women's health, the rising rate of metabolic disease, and policy for LGBTQ+ and immigrant populations. The consensus among featured experts points to comprehensive care models.
Study Finds HealthCare.gov Better at Enrolling Customers
April 12th 2015Despite its rocky launch, the federal health insurance exchange did better than the exchanges run by individual states at both enrolling new people in Obamacare and hanging onto previous enrollees, according to a recent analysis.
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Sharp Disparities in Healthcare Access Across 4 Largest States
April 12th 2015The national divide over the Affordable Care Act is beginning to affect Americans' access to medical care and perhaps even their ability to pay medical bills, a new study of the country's 4 largest states suggests.
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Two Tales of Medicaid Expansion: in Montana, a Step Forward; in Florida, a Step Back
April 10th 2015In Montana, 13 Republicans helped give a Medicaid expansion bill a solid majority to send it back to the Senate for reconciliation. A bill signing could come by next week. In Florida, Governor Rick Scott appeared to reverse his 2013 position that he could not deny the uninsured access to care.
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Medical Bills a Major Burden for Cancer Patients, Survey Finds
April 8th 2015Although the Affordable Care Act has helped more people gain access to healthcare coverage, including those with pre-existing conditions such as cancer, the survey by the Cancer Support Community found that the cost of care is still too high for many cancer patients.
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The New Bipartisan Consensus for an Individual Mandate
April 3rd 2015Although those opposing the Affordable Care Act have decried the burdensome nature of the individual mandate, a recent proposal developed by Republicans seeks to address the same problem as the ACA's mandate and would impose strong penalties on the uninsured.
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Health Plans Drive Innovation, With More to Come
March 31st 2015To mark its 20th year of publication, The American Journal of Managed Care has invited guest contributors to comment on the state of healthcare from their perspective. This month, Karen Ignagni, MBA, president and CEO of America's Health Insurance Plans and consistently rated as one of healthcare's most important voices, writes how health plans are supporting value-based care and promoting consumer choice.
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QALY May Stifle Patient Access to Innovative Cancer Drugs
March 30th 2015A new study published by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics finds that reimbursement approaches based on cost-per-quality-adjusted-life-year measures rather than drug effectiveness may limit access to innovative cancer treatments.
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Voters Prefer Federal Exchange to State-Run Ones
March 27th 2015Although the Supreme Court's decision on King v. Burwell could remove subsidies from the federal marketplace, Americans prefer HealthCare.gov over the state-run exchanges, according to poll results from right-wing advocacy group Foundation for Government Accountability.
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HHS Launches Public-Private Effort to Accelerate Healthcare Transformation
March 25th 2015The Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network kicked off with its inaugural meeting bringing together public and private sector actors to discuss efforts to move healthcare toward a system that pays based on quality rather than quantity.
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Health Plan Cancellations Remain Uncommon Despite Concerns
March 25th 2015With the Affordable Care Act's requirement that most nongroup health insurance plans offer minimum coverage standards, concerns arose about plan cancellations affecting those who already had insurance coverage. However, recent data found cancellations were uncommon.
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Analysis: Half of Households With ACA Subsidy to Owe Repayment, 45% to Get Refund
March 24th 2015The most common reasons for repayments or refunds are changes in income or family size. The law allows consumers to report these changes to the Marketplace throughout the year, but with the law being so new, most 2014 reconciliations will happen during tax filing.
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Medicaid Expansion Improved Diabetes Detection, Study Finds
March 23rd 2015The study, conducted by the national laboratory Quest Diagnostics, found that in states that expanded Medicaid, he number of Medicaid enrollees with newly identified diabetes rose by 23%, to 18,020 in the first 6 months of 2014, from 14,625 in the same period in 2013.
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Workplace Insurance Enrollment Unaffected by the ACA
March 22nd 2015There has been much hand wringing over the health law requirement that large employers this year offer insurance to workers who put in 30 or more hours a week or face penalties for not doing so. A new study found that so far there's little cause for concern.
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As ACA Nears 5-Year Mark, Opinion Still Divided But Less So
March 20th 2015Opinion on the Affordable Care Act still breaks sharply along partisan lines, making the prospects for even technical fixes unlikely, much less a major change that might be needed in the wake of a ruling in King v. Burwell that would take away premium subsidies in states without their own exchanges.
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Enrollees on the Exchanges Fill More and Costlier Prescriptions
March 19th 2015Patients enrolled in plans on the public health insurance exchange filled more prescriptions than commercial members during the first year of enrollment under Affordable Care Act, according to a report from Prime Therapeutics.
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Coalition Looks at ACO Formation, Safer IT, and Healthcare of the Future
March 18th 2015The ACO and Emerging Healthcare Delivery Coalition, an initiative of The American Journal of Managed Care, launched a little over a year ago to give stakeholders focused on accountable care opportunities to share ideas on how to move from volume- to value-based models. The Coalition's most recent Web-based session shows how meetings have evolved to highly detailed discussions of how organizations are making those transitions.
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