Health Policy

Effective January 1, 2023, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) eliminated enrollee cost-sharing for recommended vaccines covered under Medicare Part D. In 2021, 3.4 million people received vaccines under Part D, and annual out-of-pocket costs were $234 million.

Prescription drug price increases create affordability challenges for patients and for the government. This report tracks drug price changes from 2016-2022. There were 1,216 products whose price increases during the twelve-month period from July 2021 to July 2022 exceeded the inflation rate of 8.5 percent for that time period. The average price increase for these drugs was 31.6 percent.

Payers across the health care spectrum have begun transitioning from paying for quantity toward paying for quality. These value-based payment (VBP) programs vary in scope and focus, but generally share the goals of improving cost-savings and linking payments to value rather than volume.

This posting includes a report prepared by the RAND Corporation, “State All Payer Claims Databases Understanding the Current Landscape and Challenges to Use,” which builds on a 2021 report “The History, Promise and Challenges of State All Payer Claims Databases.” The new report provides additional detail on the objectives of and use cases for APCDs, the current APCD landscape, and implementati

The Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) contracted with RAND Health Care to develop methods for imputing race and ethnicity among people who selected Marketplace plans on HealthCare.gov but did not report their race or ethnicity, and to apply these methods to data from the 2015 to 2022 Open Enrollment Periods.

Telehealth services expanded rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey (HPS) in 2021, this Issue Brief analyzes national trends in telehealth utilization across all payers and examines how use of video-enabled vs. audio-only telehealth services differ across patient populations.

On January 1, 2022, the surprise billing provisions of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 - commonly referred to as the No Surprises Act - go into effect. Surprise billing occurs when a privately insured individual receives an unexpected bill either in an emergency situation or when a service in an in-network facility is provided by an out-of-network provider.

This report to Congress analyzed 10 years of data to look at trends in emergency department utilization at the national and state levels. The report analyzes three categories of utilization:

States have begun to collect and post information on bed availability (i.e., create bed registries or bed tracking systems) as a tool for providers, patients, and caregivers to identify open beds more efficiently.

This paper seeks to document the frequency of Medicaid coverage loss among full-benefit dual eligible beneficiaries and identify potential causes for coverage loss. For dual eligible beneficiaries, the loss of full-benefit Medicaid coverage is of concern because most of them do not have an alternative source of health insurance for the services covered by full-benefit Medicaid.