This year’s State Health Research and Policy Interest Group meeting, held on Saturday, June 23 in conjunction with the AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting, featured emerging research on current issues facing state health policy professionals, including implementation of federal health reforms and other reforms states are undertaking.
This one-day meeting included panel presentations focused on understanding the impact of the coverage provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) on various populations, delivery system and payment reforms, efforts to monitor ACA implementation, and lessons learned from state reforms that are already in place.
The full meeting materials, including all presentations, are available on the State Interest Group’s website. Some highlights from the presentations include:
- Julie Sonier, Deputy Director of the State Health Access Data Assistance Center (SHADAC) at the University of Minnesota, presented on a new spreadsheet-based tool under development at SHADAC that will help states predict the health insurance coverage impacts of the ACA and plan accordingly.
- M. Susan Ridgely, a Senior Policy Analyst at RAND Corporation, shared some lessons learned to-date from the implementation of the PROMETHEUS Payment, based on a case study evaluation of three sites.
- Joanna Turner, a Senior Research Fellow at SHADAC, highlighted work she is undertaking with the United States Census Bureau to make changes to the Current Population Survey. She reviewed some experimental new questions related to health insurance coverage and their impact on state health policymakers.
- Ian Hill, a Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute, detailed the impacts of Louisiana’s Express Lane Eligibility for its Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Express Lane Eligibility increased enrollment in CHIP, with the proportion of uninsured among Medicaid-eligible children in the state falling from 5.3 percent to 2.9 percent from 2009 – 2011.
