By: Dan Diamond Indiana is abuzz with news that the Trump administration this week will approve the state's pending Medicaid waiver, which would add a work requirement for able-bodied adults, multiple sources tell POLITICO's Rachana Pradhan. Indiana's pioneering conservative Medicaid model — which CMS Administrator Seema Verma helped develop as a consultant and then-Gov. Mike Pence used to expand ...
By Robert Preidt Americans spent more on health care in 2016, even though their use of health care did not increase, and rising costs are the reason why, a new report shows. "It is time to have a national conversation on the role of price increases in the growth of health care spending," said Niall Brennan, president of the Health Care Cost Institute. The institute is a non-partisan, nonprof...
By: Carolyn Johnson Americans who get health insurance through their jobs are not using more medical care than they were five years ago, but they are spending more due to soaring medical prices, according to a new report. Health spending for the more than 150 million people who receive insurance through their employers was $5,407 per person in 2016. That is a 4.6 percent increase over 2015, even t...
Among disabled Medicare beneficiaries, county-level socioeconomic factors are associated with opioid prescriptions, with more prescriptions seen with lower socioeconomic indicators, according to a study published in the January issue of Medical Care. Chao Zhou, Ph.D., from the Health Care Cost Institute in Washington, D.C., and colleagues examined opioid prescriptions of disabled Medicare benefic...
Past literature has found links between higher opioid use and local economic conditions for people enrolled in public health programs, but there has been little discussion of whether this relationship occurs among the privately insured. Using HCCI claims data and county level income data from the US Census Bureau, we examined how a county's median household income relates to long-term opioid use a...
