New Report Finds Value in the ACA’s Marketplaces
Amidst the noise of insurance companies deciding whether or not to sell on the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) marketplaces and proposed rates “doom,” the Commonwealth Fund released a new report that paints a brighter picture of the ACA and its...
Existing State Hospital Oversight Inadequate for Era of Hospital Consolidation, Closures
The hospital landscape in this country is changing rapidly. Hospitals are consolidating, with mergers and acquisitions jumping from 66 in 2010 to 112 in 2015, an increased pace that is continuing in 2016. Regional and national health systems are growing...
Washington State Advocates Inserting Consumer Voice Into Accountable Communities of Health
(Last year, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation launched a joint initiative with Community Catalyst called the Value Advocacy Project (VAP). The project is supporting consumer health advocacy organizations in six states in their non-lobbying advocacy efforts to pursue local and...
Progress Despite Setbacks: Ensuring LGBTQ Health Equity Amidst Discriminatory State Policies
2016 legislative sessions around the country have introduced a slew of distressing and shameful new laws aimed at stripping equal rights from the LGBTQ community. Hundreds more of these discriminatory proposals are still pending in state legislatures all around the...
The Takeaway: Summer Reruns
The thing about health policy “news” is that the same stories keep popping up over and over. This week we were treated to another episode of the long-running drama, “Repeal and Replace,” and also a sequel to that summertime favorite,...
A Super-Condensed Advocate’s Guide to the New Medicaid Managed Care Rules!
Medicaid managed care just got a dramatic update that will align it more closely to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Marketplaces and Medicare Advantage over the next several years. In Medicaid managed care, the state pays managed care plans to...
Money, Money, Money, Money: Unpacking New Data on Hospital Profitability and Pricing
A recent Health Affairs study on hospital profitability has been garnering national press attention for finding that seven of the “Top 10” most profitable hospitals were non-profits. These findings will likely reverberate in states where policymakers are currently revisiting the...
Health Reform 2.0: Emerging Efforts on Value-Based Health Care in California
Last year, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation launched a joint initiative with Community Catalyst called the Value Advocacy Project (VAP). The project is supporting consumer health advocacy organizations in six states in their non-lobbying advocacy efforts to pursue local and...
Health and Housing: The Benefits and Pitfalls of Partnerships
We know that as the energy in the health care world turns to reinventing health care delivery systems, social and economic determinants of health and the role they play in community health are front and center. Studies have uniformly shown...