Health Outcomes

This Issue Brief investigates how health insurance coverage, as well as healthcare access and affordability, has changed in recent years, with an emphasis on policies implemented from 2021 to 2024. Over 300 million Americans now have health insurance coverage. The U.S. uninsured rate has fallen significantly over the past four years.

This ASPE issue brief lays out a proposed comprehensive analytic framework to fully evaluate the impact of the CMS Innovation Center’s efforts on the Medicare program and the broader health care system as a whole to test innovative payment and service delivery models that reduce program expenditures while preserving or enhancing the quality of care.

This research report describes patterns in insurance coverage and uninsurance rates in rural and urban areas, reviews non-financial challenges in accessing care faced by many rural residents, and describes disparities in health outcomes between urban and rural areas.

This Issue Brief examines the impact of Medicaid throughout its six decades and highlights the importance of Medicaid coverage for low-income children and adults. The brief reviews studies showing that access to Medicaid coverage is associated with a significant improvement in health and mortality.

Nursing homes have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. The purpose of this study was to examine whether there were racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic differences in COVID-19 infection and mortality rates at both the nursing home resident and nursing home facility levels. The study includes national data on COVID-19 outcomes for nursing home residents through the end of June 2021.

The uninsured rate for nonelderly Latinos decreased from 32.7 percent to 18.0 percent, from 2010 to 2022, however, Latinos are more than twice as likely to be uninsured as non-Latino Whites.

Recent legislative and administrative policy initiatives have built on the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) expansion of health insurance coverage and improvements in access to and utilization of health care services.

Since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s coverage provisions, the uninsured rate among nonelderly Black Americans decreased by 10 percentage points, from 20.9 percent in 2010 to 10.8 percent in 2022.

This brief describes progress in the Child Welfare and Health Infrastructure for Linking and Data Analysis of Resources, Effectiveness, and Needs (CHILDREN) Initiative, which is entering its second year. At this time, four jurisdictions have been selected for participation in the CHILDREN Initiative and are engaging in feasibility studies to determine readiness for linking data.

Stakeholders, researchers, and policymakers have identified varying nursing home ownership structures and ownership transactions as potentially influencing the quality of care delivered to vulnerable residents.