Policy & Regulation

The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) released an environmental scan report that tells the emerging story of the many successes and challenges in improving COVID-19 testing and vaccination rates, especially among people who are medically or socially at disproportionate risk of COVID-19 or related adverse outcomes.

The Foundations for Evidenced-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 (Evidence Act) provided an important opportunity to Federal Agencies to assess and improve, where needed, their evaluation and other evidence building activities.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) authorizes the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to negotiate prices directly with participating manufacturers for selected drugs that have high total spending and are high expenditure, single source drugs without generic or biosimilar competition.

This project developed a calculator to help people anticipate how a change in earnings from employment would affect their net income, and in so doing, provide public benefit recipients with their estimated effective marginal tax rate on new earnings. Key Points:

This Data Point examines new National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) data to assess recent changes in health coverage for the population. The most recent data finds that the national uninsured rate for all ages declined 1.9% from 2019 to 2022, with early 2023 data showing even greater decreases reaching an all-time low national uninsured rate of 7.7%.

Expanding access to high-quality, affordable health care has been a priority of the Biden-Harris Administration.

This research report updates prior reports on Medicare FFS telehealth trends during the COVID-19 public health emergency with data through end of 2021, by beneficiary characteristics, visit specialty and geography including by state. Medicare telehealth flexibilities during the COVID-19 pandemic continued to encourage use of telehealth among Medicare beneficiaries in 2021.

ASPE contracted with RAND Health Care to catalogue and assess state changes to Medicaid telehealth policies during the COVID-19 PHE through May 2022 and identify the driving circumstances, motivations, and evidence supporting telehealth policy decisions during the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE).

This first report focuses largely on establishing a baseline and a framework for further evaluation.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will make key changes to improve drug affordability for people who have Medicare.