“Public Charge” Rule Targets Immigrants Enrolled in Medicaid
Last week, the Trump administration revealed its final “public charge” rule — a policy change that would effectively punish legal immigrants who use their Medicaid coverage to help pay for virtually any nonemergency medical care. As George Washington University’s Sara Rosenbaum explains on To the Point, the rule would expand the government’s ability to deem legal immigrants who are not yet citizens as public charges — individuals considered financially dependent on the government. And Medicaid is chief among the benefits counting toward public-charge status.
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| | Insurance coverage saves lives, per a new blog post from @shanoorseervai and @DavidBlumenthal
@Commonwealthfnd https://buff.ly/2M8Tbg8 |
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How Many Americans Die Prematurely from Treatable Causes?
Americans are living shorter lives than they did a decade ago. In the first of a series of posts on To the Point examining key measures of U.S. health system performance, the Commonwealth Fund’s David Radley looks at one of the underlying reasons for this troubling trend: people in the United States are dying prematurely from treatable conditions at higher rates.
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As Important as Clean Water: Health Coverage
The Commonwealth Fund’s Shanoor Seervai and David Blumenthal, M.D., make the case for treating health coverage as a lifesaving public health intervention. They cite a new study showing that 15,600 deaths between 2014 and 2017 could have been avoided if all states had expanded Medicaid — the latest research demonstrating that having insurance can be a matter of life and death.
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“Gag Rule” Limits Access to Family Planning Services
In March, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued new regulations governing federal Title X funding, the grant program that’s a major source of financing for family planning services. Often referred to as the “gag rule,” the regulations impose restrictions on the information Title X–funded health care providers can share with patients and set stringent requirements on those that provide abortion services using other funds. Cindy Mann and Nina Punukollu of Manatt Health report on the likely effects of the rule and other related developments.
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Rural America’s Maternity Care Crisis
Rural hospital and obstetric unit closures are forcing an increasing number of women to give birth outside the hospital, deliver in one that doesn’t provide OB care, or have preterm births. As the Commonwealth Fund’s Corinne Lewis, Isabel Paxton, and Laurie Zephyrin, M.D., report, all these outcomes carry greater risks for both mother and baby.
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Better Care Playbook: New Resources
Explore the latest resources in the Better Care Playbook, which curates evidence-based practices and promising approaches to improve care for people with complex health and social needs.
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A new blog post reports on a growing trend in Medicare Advantage: institutional special-needs plans, which seek to provide robust primary care and care coordination to nursing home residents and reduce hospitalizations.
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Lessons from accountable care organizations reveal better ways to address serious illness through advance care planning, home-based palliative care, and other interventions.
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AHCJ Fellowships Open
Applications are now being accepted for two Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) fellowships supported by the Commonwealth Fund. The Reporting Fellowships on Health Care Performance is a year-long program enabling midcareer journalists to pursue a significant reporting project examining health care systems. The program is meant to help journalists understand and report on the performance of local health care markets and the U.S. health system as a whole. Applications are due October 21.
The International Health Study Fellowships enable veteran U.S.-based health care journalists to pursue a six-month project comparing a facet of the U.S. health care system to that of another country. Applications are due October 7.
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