Tuesday, January 31, 2023 | The Latest Research, Commentary, And News From Health Affairs
Dear
John,
We will host a number of events in February, including a briefing that will cover health spending and financing of nursing homes. Check out our upcoming events to learn more.
Medicaid HCBS Recipients And COVID-19 Deaths
In their new Health Affairs paper,
H. Stephen Kaye and Joseph Caldwell use health plan data from twelve states during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic to examine mortality among recipients of Medicaid home and community-based services who are younger than age sixty-five.
They find excess mortality rates for this group of people with disabilities were 7.4 times those of community-dwelling
Medicaid beneficiaries of the same age not receiving home and community-based services and 26.6 times those of the general population.
Further, "as a proportion of expected mortality, excess mortality rates for older recipients and nursing home residents were comparable," Kaye and Caldwell report.
The authors posit that multiplate factors likely contributed to the high mortality rates of home and community-based services recipients, "including individual risk factors, societal barriers, and indirect impacts."
Today in Forefront, Dennis Heaphy and Sasha Shenk argue that CMS should include spiritual care as a covered service for dually eligible individuals enrolled in capitated managed-care plans.
Community & State is the business segment of UnitedHealthcare that provides health care coverage for the economically disadvantaged, the medically underserved and those without the benefit of employer-funded health plans. These state-based health plans meet
local needs, while leveraging the national resources of UnitedHealthcare.
Loren Adler On Surprise Ambulance Bills And Beyond
Health Affairs Editor-in-Chief Alan Weil interviews Loren Adler from the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy about pricing and billing for ground ambulance transportation.
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.
