Robert Berenson, Urban Institute fellow, testified before the US Senate Committee on Finance about health care during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting the current state of telehealth payments and explaining the benefits of alternative payment methods over standard fee-for-service.
An analysis of three phase-in scenarios for reducing private hospital payments illustrates the difficulty in achieving Medicare or near-Medicare hospital fees in private insurance without a significant phase-in period to prevent adverse effects on the hospital system.
Urban researchers examined two health reform policies, one incremental and the other more comprehensive, showing that both reforms redistribute toward groups with lower average incomes, yielding coverage gains for the uninsured and improved affordability for others.
Families are generally ineligible for Marketplace premium tax credits if a family member is offered worker-only coverage deemed affordable, regardless of the cost of covering the entire family. We investigate the impact of making such family members eligible.
This brief examines the reliability of data collected using the new birth certificate form, including three new additions on the 2003 birth certificate and three other variables that have proven unreliable but are of significant policy research interest.
