Health Policy

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.

In this Issue Brief, we examine spending growth through 2014, the first year the Affordable Care Act’s coverage provisions were in effect, and 2015, where possible. We provide detailed cost growth trends for Medicare and the private insurance market. We also estimate the effect of recently introduced specialty drugs on current and future spending growth.

This Addendum contains detailed State-level tables highlighting cumulative enrollment-related information for the Health Insurance Marketplaces (Marketplaces) during the 2016 Open Enrollment period for all 50 states and the District of Columbia (11-1-15 to 1-31-16, including Special Enrollment Period (SEP) activity through 2-1-16).