Who Is Going Without Needed Care During COVID-19?
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have avoided hospitals and clinics. On To The Point, Commonwealth Fund researchers report on which Americans skipped needed care between April and the end of July. Based on recent census data, they found that elderly adults were much less likely to postpone care than younger adults after practices reopened. And their findings suggest that Medicare spending may rebound faster than commercial health insurance spending.
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COVID-19 and Medicare Insolvency
The Congressional Budget Office released a report projecting that Medicare’s federal Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, which helps pay for Medicare beneficiaries’ hospital bills, will be insolvent by fiscal year 2024. In STAT, the Commonwealth Fund’s Gretchen Jacobson argues that, regardless of who wins the election in November, the new administration and Congress will need to develop a plan to address Medicare’s solvency — and decide who will pay to extend it.
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How to Run a Field Hospital During a Pandemic
This past spring, British physician James Mountford of London and his old friend and colleague Gregg Meyer, an American physician based in Boston, were both tasked with launching field hospitals in their respective cities in anticipation of a surge of COVID-19 patients. For our Q&A, we spoke with them about how they helped one another meet the challenges both faced in the early days of the pandemic.
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How Will COVID-19 Affect the Opioid Epidemic?
Drug overdose deaths jumped to record highs at the end of 2019, just before COVID-19 began taking hold. On To the Point, the Commonwealth Fund’s Jesse Baumgartner, Gabriella Aboulafia, and Sara Collins report that some states may be battling larger economic downturns alongside a worsening opioid epidemic. “Without coordinated and significant action, we risk reducing access to substance-use treatment just as our opioid-related care needs are at their peak,” the authors say.
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Creating Stability in the Small-Business Health Insurance Market
COVID-19 has hit small businesses especially hard, making it more challenging for them to offer health insurance to their employees. But certain regulatory measures can help stabilize the small-group market. Health care researchers Mark Hall and Michael McCue focus on two: restricting self-insured plans and transitional plans. They find that from 2015 to 2019, states that restricted self-insured and transitional plans had a less costly, healthier pool of enrollees.
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Other Recent Publications | |
PBS NewsHour Looks at Health Care Systems in Europe, Australia, and the U.S.
A new five-part PBS NewsHour series developed with support from the Commonwealth Fund takes viewers to the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Australia, and the United States to explore the different paths to universal coverage and offer lessons on how the U.S. might move forward on health care. On the NewsHour site, viewers also can take a quiz to test their knowledge of health care systems and compare prices and access across countries.
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How Independent Primary Care Clinicians Fill Gaps in Care
A new report examines how two independent primary care practices, one in New Hampshire and the other in Vermont, tailor their services to patients who struggle to afford care, deal with chronic physical or mental health conditions, or need help finding social supports. The case studies also show how these practices have served patients during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how they’ve leveraged value-based payment approaches to stay afloat.
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Hospital at Home Programs Continue to Spread
Last month both AP News and Business Insider reported on how the pandemic has prompted more hospitals to offer patients the option of receiving care in their homes, which can reduce infection risk and free up beds for COVID-19 patients. The July issue of
Transforming Care
examines the hospital-at-home model in practice at Mount Sinai, Tufts, MetroHealth, and other health systems.
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