Millions of people have gained health-insurance coverage through federal and state exchanges, direct purchases from insurers, and Medicaid expansions.
On Tuesday, more than 40 activists were arrested while protesting Georgia Governor Nathan Deal’s refusal to accept the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion.
Affordable Care Act
Massachusetts study: High demand for publicly funded family planning services, despite near universal insurance
Higher insurance rates don’t mean people stop seeking care at publically funded health centers, found a recent study of family planning clinics in Massachusetts. The findings speak to serious concerns within public health circles that policy-makers may point to higher insurance rates as a justification to cut critical public health funding.
Three articles just published in the American Journal of Public Health address home-visit programs for expectant and new parents. As accumulating research finds these interventions to improve children’s health and development, will the Affordable Care Act’s funding for home-visit programs be renewed?
For the first time, Congress has specified how Prevention and Public Health Fund money will be allocated — a move that helps assure it won’t be shifted to other healthcare priorities that don’t significantly advance prevention.
With so much pressure on the Affordable Care Act to immediately live up to high expectations, and with opponents who seem gleeful at the news that Americans are having a hard time signing up for affordable health care, it’s reassuring to read that the health reform law can readily take a few blows and keep moving forward.
Now that it’s 2014, millions more people in the US have health insurance coverage (either Medicaid or private insurance), thanks to the Affordable Care Act. Two different Medicaid efforts in Oregon hold lessons about what it might take to turn expanded insurance coverage into better health outcomes.
A refund check from my health insurance provider is another sign that Obamacare is working for healthcare consumers. (Re-post, by Celeste Monforton)
A new report finds most states spend a small fraction of their tobacco settlement and tax income on smoking prevention and cessation. Congress keeps cutting the ACA’s Prevention and Public Health Fund. An Institute of Medicine Committee recommends ways to assure we stop making these short-sighted cuts.
If you think that Obama’s health insurance debacle is the first time that software problems have derailed a national health insurance plan, you would be wrong. I recall a similar event in Prague in 1995.