Reports & Analysis

This article describes the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation’s new rapid-cycle evaluation approach, which will assess its success at reducing expenditures and preserving or improving the quality of care provided to beneficiaries of Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

This brief examines several case studies from the AF4Q communities and the care-across-settings initiatives that they are undertaking. Their experiences demonstrate that the weakest link in a patient’s care is often the transition from one setting to another, but our health care system does not have consistent systems or funds in place for establishing care transitions programs.

The ACA expands Medicaid to 138% FPL in 2014, which would make millions of adults newly eligible for the program. However, if a state does not expand Medicaid, poor uninsured adults in that state will not gain a new coverage option and will likely remain uninsured. This brief provides an overview of current Medicaid and CHIP eligibility levels for nondisabled children and adults to provide better insight into the impact of the Medicaid expansion.

This checklist prepared by the National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP) highlights the ACA Medicaid requirements that will take effect in the next two years, nearly all of which will apply to states regardless of whether the state chooses to expand Medicaid eligibility.  The checklist also highlights a few important optional provisions that states may want to consider as they plan for modernizing their Medicaid programs and complying with federal requirements.

To spur competition among plans, the ACA created the Multi-state Plan Program (MSPP). The Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which administers health insurance programs for federal employees and members of Congress, will certify and oversee health insurance issuers to offer at least two plans in every state exchange. This policy brief explores the background of the MSPP, the challenges facing OPM in administering it, and the issues associated with offering health insurance plans in multiple states.

In May 2011, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin signed legislation to implement Green Mountain Care (GMC), a single-payer, publicly financed, universal health care system. Vermont's reform law passed 15 months after the historic federal Affordable Care Act (ACA) became law. In passing reforms, Vermont took matters into its own hands and is well ahead of most other states in its efforts to implement federal and state health care reforms by 2014. Although Vermont is a small state, its reform efforts provide valuable lessons for other states in implementing ACA reforms.

The Pacific Business Group on Health recently released an issue brief touting the top 5 rules for decision support . The list includes strategies that their research indicates will have a large impact on consumers’ plan choice experiences on State Based Exchange (SBE) web portals. 

This report relays the experiences of seven accountable care organizations (ACOs) based on interviews with clinical and administrative leaders. The most advanced ACOs are seeing reductions or slower growth in health care costs and have anecdotal evidence of care improvements. Some of the ACOs studied have begun or are planning to share savings with providers if quality benchmarks are met.

The new National Scorecard on Payment Reform released today by Catalyst for Payment Reform is the first effort to measure progress in improving how health care is paid for in the United States. The Scorecard, produced with support from The Commonwealth Fund and the California HealthCare Foundation, finds that 11 percent of private health care payments to doctors and hospitals are tied to performance or designed to cut waste.