Thursday, January 6, 2022 | The Latest Research, Commentary, And News From Health Affairs
Dear John,
Articles in the January issue of Health Affairs discuss health insurance coverage effects and enrollment.
Coverage Effects And Enrollment
George Wehby linked birth certificate data to standardized test scores for children in Iowa and provided strong evidence that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) insurance expansions led to improvements in reading scores, particularly among children in households of mothers with a high school education or less, in the third and fourth years after Iowa’s expansion.
"The findings point to broader spillover benefits from widespread insurance coverage gains, particularly for low-income households," Wehby wrote.
The January issue of Health Affairs also includes a report examining California’s ACA Marketplace, Covered California. Toward the end of each open enrollment period, tens of thousands of people begin but do not complete the process.
Rebecca Myerson and coauthors reported results from a randomized trial showing that personalized telephone calls from service center representatives to discuss consumers’ options increased enrollment for lower-income households, with particularly large increases seen among adults older than age fifty.
"In the absence of structural enrollment reforms such as auto-enrollment, our study indicates that personalized outbound call interventions may still induce modest but meaningful enrollment gains in certain populations while yielding a positive return on investment," Myerson and coauthors concluded. Today in Health Affairs Forefront, Joshua Liao and coauthors discuss how improving care coordination will require the formation of local provider–community partnerships.
In GrantWatch, Lee L. Prina writes about staff and board changes over the past several months at philanthropies around the country that fund in health-related areas.
Health Affairs is the leading peer-reviewedjournalat the intersection of health, health care, and policy. Published monthly by Project HOPE, the journal is available in print and online. Late-breaking content is also found through healthaffairs.org, Health Affairs Today, and Health Affairs Sunday Update.
Project HOPE is a global health and humanitarian relief organization that places power in the hands of local health care workers to save lives across the globe. Project HOPE has published Health Affairs since 1981.
