Last month, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) held the first ever CMS Health Equity Conference. CHIR members who attended the inaugural conference provide an overview of the meeting—including a presentation by CHIR’s Christine Monahan—and its implications for current and future health equity initiatives.
It is hard to overstate the importance of primary care in ensuring robust health outcomes at the population level. In a new report supported by the National Institute for Health Care Reform, CHIR experts reviewed research to assess whether policy initiatives targeting primary care access have been effective in reducing health care disparities.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has narrowed racial and ethnic health disparities. But significant gaps persist, driven in no small part by structural racism. In a new piece for Health Affairs Forefront, Jamille Fields Allsbrook and CHIR faculty Katie Keith discuss how the Biden administration can use its existing authority under Section 1557 of the ACA and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to better ensure anti-racist health care and insurance.
In a new post for the Commonwealth Fund’s To the Point blog, Katie Keith highlights several Affordable Care Act requirements that have not been fully utilized by insurers — resulting in gaps that exacerbate disparities. The post identifies examples where insurers and regulators could do more to turn commitment on health equity and racial justice into action.
The American Rescue Plan made health insurance more affordable, but covering the 30 million remaining uninsured will require innovative efforts to broadcast and facilitate enrollment in subsidized insurance. To that end, several states, following an inaugural effort in Maryland, have proposed or are implementing a new avenue to enrollment through the tax-filing process. In a new post for the Commonwealth Fund’s To the Point blog, CHIR experts take a look at states that are operating or implementing “Easy Enrollment” programs, and how they may offer a bridge to more ambitious initiatives like automatic enrollment.
This month, CHIR’s Mari Tikoyan read studies on the role of the Affordable Care Act in addressing health insurance disparities among Asian Americans, the impact of COVID-19 on health insurance coverage, and the price of COVID-19 testing.
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has placed enormous pressure on virtually all facets of U.S. society. Much attention has appropriately been placed on the efforts of health care providers to deliver care to those infected with COVID-19. However, less is known about the experiences of the health insurers who reimburse those health care providers for the care they deliver. In a new report supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, insurance experts at CHIR and the Urban Institute share findings from interviews with executives at 25 health insurance companies on their impressions of the ongoing ramifications of the pandemic and their response to the crisis.
This May, we explored studies assessing COVID-19’s effect on community health centers, data on racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 mortality rates, and changes in health spending and utilization during the crisis.
The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced new challenges for Navigators. To learn more about their experience, and how they are helping consumers manage often unexpected transitions in coverage, CHIR’s Olivia Hoppe talked with six navigators across five states using the FFM to hear how they were faring.
To kick off 2020, CHIR’s Olivia Hoppe reviews studies on out-of-network billing from hospital-based physicians, the Affordable Care Act’s effect on racial and ethnic access disparities, health care market consolidation, and 2020 marketplace premiums and insurer participation.
The opinions expressed here are solely those of the individual blog post authors and do not represent the views of Georgetown University, the Center on Health Insurance Reforms, any organization that the author is affiliated with, or the opinions of any other author who publishes on this blog.
