This policy brief discusses preventive care benefits and cost-sharing included in health insurance provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) legislation and highlights some consequences to Americans and the country in terms of healthcare costs and value.

The Affordable Care Act requires health insurers to justify rate increases that are 10 percent or more for nongrandfathered plans in the individual and small-group markets. Analyzing these filings for renewals taking effect from mid-2013 through mid-2014, this brief finds that the average rate increase submitted for review was 13 percent. Insurers attributed the great bulk of these larger rate ...

Public health in the United States can be improved by building workplace "cultures of health" that support healthy lifestyles. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), which includes the Prevention and Public Health Fund, will support a new focus on prevention and wellness, offering opportunities to strengthen the public's health through workplace wellness initiatives. This article describes the opportun...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (the ACA) aims to increase access to care, improve the quality of care, and lower total health care costs. While the ACA can benefit all individuals and families, it has significant potential in expanding and improving services for those experiencing homelessness. Through the optional expansion of Medicaid and adoption of Medicaid waiver se...

Community health centers are the nation’s largest source of comprehensive primary care for medically underserved communities and populations. Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), increased patient revenues due to the expansion of Medicaid and private health insurance, along with substantially increased direct federal investment in the program, have led to growth in the number of health centers ...

On June 28, 2012 the United States Supreme Court upheld the Patient Rights and Affordable Care Act (ACA), which was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010. The individual mandate and the extension of Medicaid eligibility are the primary components of ACA and have drawn a great deal of attention from the media and public. However, little attention has focused on how ACA will affect ve...

Background The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) was signed into law in 2010. In the past four years, federal and state governments have made changes to existing programs, created new ones, and attempted to foster innovation in the health care system. We provide an update on implementation of the ACA in California, specifically focused on the expansion of Medi-Cal for low-income ...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) authorizes several changes to the Resource-Based Relative Value Scale (RBRVS) system that are designed to increase primary care physician personal income and reduce geographic variation in primary care payment. In this brief, the ACA-authorized primary care payment adjustments are modeled in a prototypical rural primary care practice to asses...

In the early stages of drafting what would become the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the notion of including a federal health insurance issuer in the online marketplaces engen-deredanintensedebate. 1

While the Affordable Care Act (ACA) focused largely on improving access to health care coverage for the uninsured, its broader and longer-term influence may have been its impact on accelerating key trends and strategies that major employers and other stakeholders have been targeting for years. This article looks at some of these trends, where we were pre-ACA and how ACA (through benefit mandate...