The Latest Research, Commentary, And News From Health Affairs
Thursday, September 16, 2021
Dear John,
New articles examine the Medicare Advantage quality bonus payment program and the association of unemployment with Medicaid enrollment.
Medicare Advantage & Medicaid Enrollment
The September issue includes a paper discussing Medicare and one discussing Medicaid.
The first paper is focused on the Medicare Advantage (MA) quality bonus payment program, which provides a
“double bonus” to high-quality plans in certain metropolitan areas.
Adam Markovitz and colleagues found that double bonuses are not significantly associated with changes in quality performance or in MA enrollment, and “Black beneficiaries were substantially less likely to reside in counties offered double bonuses than White beneficiaries.” In the second paper, Paul Shafer and coauthors examined the association of unemployment with Medicaid
enrollment by social vulnerability in North Carolina during COVID-19.
They estimated that the total share of the state's population enrolled in Medicaid rose after the onset of the pandemic, ranging from 19.4 to 19.8 percent between January 2018 and February 2020 and increasing to 21.2 percent by August 2020. More socially vulnerable counties have had a stronger relationship between rising unemployment
and Medicaid enrollment during COVID-19, they found.
Today on Health Affairs Blog, Anna Morenz and Joshua Liao discuss directing health care payment in ways that account for social determinants of health.
Leandro Mena, director of the CDC's National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention, discusses new data that show that rates of congenital and adult syphilis are on the rise.
Elevating Voices: Hispanic Heritage Month: In the October 2020 Children’s Health issue, Dolores Acevedo-Garcia and coauthors argued that, to improve children’s health and well-being, the health sector must move beyond a focus on treating disease or modifying individual behavior to a broader focus on neighborhood conditions.
Check out our COVID-19 Resource Center for Health Affairs content about all things related to the pandemic.
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