ASPE Issue Brief

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:

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) released new research on spending and utilization trends of Medicare Part B drugs, drugs administered in physicians' office or hospital outpatient departments rather than being purchased at the pharmacy counter or by mail order.

This brief provides key considerations for policy designers and funding partners—such as federal staff, technical experts, and philanthropic partners—on incorporating primary prevention into human services delivery.

This brief highlights a new way of delivering primary prevention services that promotes equity by relying on the guidance and leadership of people with lived experience. The policy designers and service providers behind prevention services should have lived experience and/or co-create these services with people who do.

Enrollment in Medicare Advantage plans has increased rapidly in recent years. The share of eligible Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in MA rose from 25% in 2010 to 47% in 2021 (27.6 million enrollees). Payments to MA plans more than doubled between 2015 and 2021 (from $175 to $361 billion), taking the share of total Medicare Parts A & B spending on MA from 38% to 54%.

Using a national Medicaid claims database, this brief estimates the number of pregnant beneficiaries with substance use disorder who lost Medicaid coverage 60 days postpartum at the national and state-level.

Telehealth utilization has changed over time since the steep increase from the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. This report updates prior findings on national trends of telehealth use through an analysis using the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey data from April 2021 through August 2022.

Many Medicaid enrollees are employed, and in 2021, 15 percent of working enrollees reported having both Medicaid and employer sponsored health coverage. The intersection between Medicaid and employment has implications for employers and others as the pandemic-related Medicaid continuous enrollment ends.

This brief provides an overview of the important role Medicaid plays in postpartum maternal health, reviews states’ existing pregnancy-related Medicaid eligibility limits, and assesses the projected eligibility impact if all states were to provide 12 months of postpartum Medicaid eligibility. This Issue Brief updates a previous report that was originally published in December 2021.

This issue brief provides a primer on FDA user fees, presents findings of how user fees affect the cost of medical product development, and summarizes the research literature on user fees, most notably in expediting medical product development and approval.