On the heels of the President’s speech on health care reform, the Census Bureau released to little fanfare new estimates of health insurance coverage from the Current Population Survey (CPS).   Between 2007 and 2008, the number of individuals without health insurance rose from 45.7 million to 46.3 million, increasing the ranks of the uninsured by [...]

Editor’s Note: During his 47 years in the Senate, the late Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts was a lion of U.S. health care and health policy. We at Health Affairs, along with much of the rest of America, grieve at his passing.  We recently asked Democratic and Republican politicians, policy experts, and former Senate staff [...]

While the most visible national health reform fight at the moment focuses on a public plan option for people covered through health insurance exchanges (or gateways), a quieter debate is brewing over whether coverage for low-income people should be achieved through Medicaid expansions or subsidies to purchase insurance through an exchange. For example, the Senate [...]

How does a health care system learn about neglected and abused children—the ones who’ve fallen through the cracks—so they can be helped? That was the story and exploration in a Narrative Matters essay by Janette Kurie titled “Where’s David?”
Kurie recently read an excerpt from her essay on NPR’s “Morning Edition.” In it she tells a [...]

The tragic death of a 12-year-old Maryland boy, whose untreated tooth infection had spread to his brain, has spurred Congress to mandate that all states provide dental services as a benefit in their State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).
The death of Deamonte Driver on February 25, 2007, shone a spotlight on the difficulties poor families [...]

The current edition of the Health Wonk Review, the biweekly round-up of health policy blogging, is hosted by Jaan Sidorov of the Disease Management Care Blog. His post-inaugural HWR highlights many interesting posts on the SCHIP votes and more. And today, Sidorov highlights the newly published perspective by Louise Russell on the cost of prevention from the current [...]

On Thursday, 15 January 2009, the House of Representatives passed a reauthorization of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, CHIPRA, by a vote of 289 to 139. On the same day the Senate Finance Committee approved a similar version of the bill by a vote of 12 to 7 and placed it on the Senate’s calendar. [...]

The State Children’s Health Insurance Program was supposed to be the MVP of various health care policy initiatives in 2007. SCHIP reauthorization, featured widely in conferences, at meetings, and on the Health Affairs Blog, had broad, bipartisan support uniting very strange bedfellows of all political stripes. Nonetheless, two bills for reauthorization were vetoed, and a modest extension keeps the [...]

Almost 17 percent of black children and 20.5 percent of Latino children in the United States live in “double jeopardy,” meaning that they live in both poor families and poor neighborhoods, according to research released today in the March/April issue of Health Affairs. In contrast, only 1.4 percent of white children live in double jeopardy.
In [...]

Perhaps the signal event in federal health policy for 2007 is the failure to reauthorize the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). On Wednesday, December 13, President Bush vetoed the second version of the SCHIP reauthorization.

Over the past two months, highly read posts on the Health Affairs Blog looked at President Bush’s veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a new report from the Congressional Budget Office on health spending trends, analysis of the number of uninsured Americans, and discussion of health reform solutions. Posts with a global [...]

On Thursday, November 1, 2007, at the Health Affairs 25th anniversary health policy summit, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) were presented awards for their leadership in bipartisan policy making in health care. In conjunction with their awards, the senators pledged their continued dedication to the cause of bipartisanship, particularly in regard [...]

Just when it looked as if the debate over the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) couldn’t get any more agonizing, some of the same folks who brought us the devastating RAND 55 percent study four years ago are back with the dismal news that children, on average, receive recommended treatment in only 46.5 percent [...]

Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt has recently launched a blog. Today he offers the administration’s view on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) reauthorization bill, which President Bush recently vetoed. 
Sec. Leavitt says that he writes his own posts. So far he’s blogging about once a week. Here’s an excerpt from today’s [...]

It’s the morning after President Bush’s veto of the reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). How did a program that started out with such bipartisan support become the health policy wonk equivalent of all-out war? Today’s Health Wonk Review takes a look across the blogosphere for some health policy soul-searching.
Politico blogger Ben [...]

The most-read post of September on the Health Affairs Blog was by Linda Aiken on Pennsylvania’s new legislation which focuses on tapping nurses and other health professionals to address health reform issues. Aiken, the Claire M. Fagin Leadership Professor of Nursing and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, also has the most-read blog post for [...]

Many of Washington policymakers and health policy experts are returning from August vacations to find that the month was not as quiet as expected. On Friday evening, August 17th, the Administration issued a major new directive on children’s health coverage that effectively eliminates SCHIP for children above 250 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL), [...]

While the last two weeks in August used to be a rather somnolent period in Washington, it seems like the participants in the SCHIP debate missed the vacation memo. The events of those weeks, the new CMS guidance on current SCHIP implementation and the release of the Census Bureau Report on Income, Poverty, and Health [...]

Now that it’s September and Congress is back in session, it’s time to prepare for the September policy showdown on reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Last month Health Affairs Blog invited policy experts with wide-ranging views to set out the hot-button issues–such as the tobacco tax funding mechanism–and explain the politics. These posts [...]

This morning the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the number of uninsured Americans jumped to 47 million in 2006, up from 44.8 million in 2005. In percentage terms, there were 15.8 percent of Americans without insurance in 2006, up from 15.3 percent in 2005. This also represents the sixth year in a row that the [...]