Health & Health Care

The first brief below provides insight into children’s and adolescents’ mental health service use in Medicaid and CHIP during the pandemic, by using a national Medicaid claims database.

The goal of this study was to examine the extent to which Medicaid providers who deliver behavioral health services shifted their practices to mostly tele-behavioral health services during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) changes the way Medicare pays for prescription drugs. These changes will impact various stakeholders, including Medicare, Medicare enrollees, drug manufacturers, and others.

The generic injectable drug market has recently experienced numerous shortages, which impose substantial public health costs. One potential cause of these shortages is low profitability of generic injectables. This brief examines the profitability of recently launched generic injectables.

Key Findings:

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.

Direct care workers (DCWs) such as nursing assistants, home health aides, and personal care assistants play an essential role in the health and well-being of over 20 million Americans. Yet DCW wages are not enough to make jobs competitive with entry level positions in other industries with similar job requirements which exacerbates the challenges in recruitment and retention of these workers.

People living with dementia often have complex health and social support needs that can best be met by health care and community-based providers working together. This brief examines promising practices for bridging community-based organizations and health care systems in the providing comprehensive dementia care.

During the pandemic period, telehealth utilization increased among both urban and rural enrollees in Medicaid, with urban enrollees sustaining greater gains in telehealth utilization at the end of 2021. This Issue Brief is part of a series of ASPE Issue Briefs examining changes in Medicaid utilization of services delivered via telehealth by enrollee and provider characteristics.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Innovation Center is in the process of developing the Medicare $2 Drug List (M2DL) Model. This would allow Part D plan sponsors to offer a standardized list of generic drugs for a copayment of $2 or less for a month’s supply that would not be subject to prior authorization, quantity limits, or other utilization management restrictions.