Health Care Delivery

The Affordable Care Act's mandate to increase Medicaid reimbursement to primary care providers has improved access to care for Medicaid enrollees, according to analysis of early evidence published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

With a Republican House and Senate and a Democrat governor, Arkansas had a difficult time passing Medicaid expansion legislation, explained Joe Thompson, MD, former state surgeon general.

Newly elected Arkansas Gov Asa Hutchinson said he wants to continue the state's Medicaid expansion compromise through December 31, 2016, but he is keeping his options open for a new plan in the future.

A little-known side to the government's health insurance website is prompting renewed concerns about privacy, just as the White House is calling for stronger cybersecurity protections for consumers.

The founding mission of AJMC was to bring the best available and most relevant evidence regarding efficient clinical and managerial practice to a broad spectrum of healthcare stakeholders-a mission that remains unchanged to this day.

US healthcare executives say that despite repeated calls from Republican lawmakers for repeal of President Obama's healthcare law, the Affordable Care Act is too entrenched to be removed.

Obama administration officials have warned that ambitious experiments run by the health law's $10 billion innovation lab wouldn't always be successful. Now there is evidence their caution was well placed.

Covered California's leader says its decision is only fair to those insurers who took on the risk of a brand new marketplace in 2014. But the state's insurance commissioner says limiting choices is unfair to consumers.

Marilyn B. Tavenner, the administrator of CMS, announced on Friday that she will be stepping down from her position at the federal agency.

Fears that Americans who signed up for Obamacare were more likely to be sicker than those with employer health programs may have been unfounded, according to data reviewed by Reuters.

The aging US population means that Medicare is taking care of more older, sicker people for longer periods of time. Population trends suggest this phenomenon will only increase, unless drastic management and healthcare delivery solutions are found.

The combination of 2 Medi-Cal primary care rate decreases could mean primary care providers who see a lot of Medi-Cal patients will have to scale back or stop seeing those beneficiaries.

Studies from RAND and the Urban Institute estimate that eliminating subsidies for the federally facilitated Marketplaces would increase premiums between 35% and 47% and cause at least 8.2 million people to drop coverage.

Cost cutting and new initiatives aimed at bringing in more patients will lead to another strong year in 2015 for for-profit hospitals. Meanwhile, their not-for-profit counterparts have been given negative outlooks by credit-rating agencies.

In command and ready for a fight, Republicans ignored a White House veto threat and advanced a bill in Congress that would curb President Barack Obama's healthcare overhaul by redefining full-time work as 40 hours a week.

If the Supreme Court invalidates Affordable Care Act subsidies for consumers on the federal exchange, states without their own Marketplaces will be unlikely to stave off "immediate destabilization" of their insurance market, according to experts.

North Carolina is the latest state to express interest in a possible waiver to expand Medicaid. But CMS and President Obama will have to rethink a position taken when Pennsylvania's request for a job training requirement was rejected last year.

The Affordable Care Act is on the move in Western states, with the governors of Utah, Wyoming, and Montana all working to hammer out deals with the Obama administration to expand Medicaid in ways tailored to each state.

By the end of 2014, the uninsured rate among American adults was down to just 12.9% compared with 17.1% when the Affordable Care Act's requirement for Americans to be covered went into effect a year prior.

The Republican Party's strategy to attack the Affordable Care Act's employer mandate by redefining a full-time employee as someone who works 40 hours a week instead of 30 hours could increase dependence on government-provided health insurance.

The percentage of people with high medical costs increased from 2007-2009 to 2011, but the Affordable Care Act's coverage provisions should substantially reduce cost burdens for many people, according to a Commonwealth Fund study.

For years, Harvard's experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar.

The Obama administration is continuing to compromise with Republican-led states that expand Medicaid.

In many ways, Kentucky, a poor state with a starkly unhealthy populace, has become a symbol of the Affordable Care Act's potential. But as the first year of coverage ends, potential obstacles to the law's success are also coming into sharp relief here.

A perspective published in the New England Journal of Medicine affirms that provisions of the Affordable Care Act will allow improved coverage of smoking cessation tools, which could be a big boost in the number of smokers planning to quit.

A large majority of people who selected health insurance plans through HealthCare.gov during the first month of open enrollment for 2015 will receive financial assistance for their monthly premiums, according to HHS.

A report from HHS notes that through December 15, 2014, 52% of enrollees were new consumers, which could indicate that the Obama Administration is on track to meeting its goal of signing up 9 million Americans for health coverage on the exchanges in 2015.

With the Affordable Care Act seemingly off to a good start, attention is likely to turn to an older program for children that will come to an end in 2015 if it is not reauthorized.

Matt Salo, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, is emerging as one of the most important observers in how the expansion of the leading healthcare program for poor Americans is unfolding across the country. In December's issue of The American Journal of Accountable Care, he addresses how the fallout of the 2014 midterms will affect Medicaid in the near term.

After website glitches stole the spotlight during the first open enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act, CMS hired Accenture to fix HealthCare.gov. Now, the consulting firm has been awarded a 5-year, $563 million contract to continue working on the website.